The Price of Things and the Values of Lives
by Dom Holdaway and Pierandrea Villa
Overview
September 29, 2016
85′
Irene Dionisio
Irene Dionisio
Tempesta, Ad Vitam, Amka Films Productions, Rai Cinema, with contributions from MiBACT, RTSI and Film Commission Torino Piemonte
Caroline Champetier
Aline Hervé
Matteo Marini, Gabriele Concas, Peter Anthony Truffa
Fabrizio Falco, Roberto De Francesco, Christina Andrea Rosamilia, Alfonso Santagata, Salvatore Cantalupo, Anna Ferruzzo
Italy: Istituto Luce Cinecittà
Gallery
Poster
Trailer
Pressbook
Representation strategies, rhetorics and stereotypes
Narrative & characters
At the heart of the film is a pawn shop in Turin. With its mix of customers and workers, it becomes a microcosm of society – a place where community might begin but is repeatedly broken by power imbalances, economic need, and moral compromise. What they share isn’t background or belief, but need: the urgent necessity to sell something, to exchange a precious object for a little cash – or the desire to make money from those in need. Though this exchange, the film captures a snapshot of city’s society, capturing all kinds of different (ethnicity, gender, disability, age) but reducing them all to the common denominator of class.
Among those who inhabit this world are Stefano (Fabrizio Falco), the newest recruit at the pawn shop, and his supervisor Sergio (Roberto De Francesco), a corrupt man who operates without scruples. Sergio not only manages the official transactions but also supports a network of men who wait outside, offering quick cash to customers or buying their pawn receipts to make a profit later. Among these intermediaries is Angelo (Salvatore Cantalupo), the brother-in-law of Michele (Alfonso Santagata).
Michele is facing serious money problems. He and his wife are trying to support their daughter, a supermarket worker, and their young grandson, Gabriele, who needs an expensive hearing aid. Driven by this wish to support them, Michele turns to Angelo and gets caught up in the system of informal and corrupt dealings that surround the pawn shop. Through Angelo’s world he encounters the quiet but relentless corruption that feeds off other people’s desperation, and the physiological stress of this conflict leads to a fatal conclusion for the character.
The film also offers many short glimpses of those who pass through the shop: people from different walks of life, all trying to recover some money by pawning their goods. They include a single mother with two children, later obliged to turn to Angelo and Michele for extra money; an African woman bargaining for a higher price for her jewellery; and an Eastern European woman railing against the injustice of the shop’s tactics. Around them, we also hear voices from Italy’s internal migration – men with southern accents, precarious workers, and people of colour involved in the informal or criminal economy.
Another important character, the third protagonist of the film, is Sandra (Christina Andrea Rosamilia) – a trans woman returning to Turin after some form of public scandal. Others recognise her from old newspaper reports, suggesting a once different social position that she has since lost. Sandra is also in financial difficulty – when she seeks help from her mother, she receives no support – and pawns her expensive fur coat. Although she finds temporary lodging among other trans women at a local pensione, she keeps her distance from them, marked by a detached and guarded attitude.
At the pawn shop, Sandra meets Stefano. Their interactions carry moments of tension and unequal power: at first, he tries to help her, showing concern, but later, when she returns asking for more time to reclaim her coat, the imbalance between them becomes clearer. There are subtle sexual undertones that shift depending on who holds control, and this dynamic ensures that their relationship, fragile from the start, cannot last.
Through these intersecting lives, the film constructs a portrait of people linked by economic struggle rather than by shared identity. Each character tries to improve their circumstances – Stefano by helping clients, Michele by helping his family, Sandra by trying to regain stability. However, their actions are shaped and often undermined by systems of debt, corruption, and power that push them apart. At times, the film signals the fragile possibility of solidarity – in particular among the trans and cis women that live with Sandra. Yet Le ultime cose suggests how easily empathy and good intentions can be worn down by inequality and the pressure of survival.
Stereotypes & strategies of inclusion
The Pawn Shop: A Ritual of Reduction
In the space of the pawn shop all characters are “reduced” to their economic status: Le ultime cose maps the translation of economic transactions onto human lives. This narrative begins one morning, as the pawn shop opens, as the security guard unlocks the door.
The camerawork within the shop constantly observes these transactions with quiet attention, avoiding explicit judgment. It monitors both Sergio’s cold, transactional approach, and Stefano’s attempts at empathy from the same detached point of view (albeit often lingering on his moralising gaze). Likewise, the faces and bodies of the clients are framed carefully: we see not just the mother, but also her children; we watch as the two African women commenting the injustice of the transaction in their own language.
Objectification and Difference
Sandra is likewise captured in the pawn shop with cold observation. As she sits and waits for her turn, the camera isolates fragments of her body – a technique used to frame her throughout the film, even in her boarding house. This fragmentation could read as objectifying, especially in its exaggeration for a trans woman. This is ironic, though, the framing seems to invite reflection on Sandra’s difference, on her embodied specificity as a transgender woman. In the pawn shop, in particular, the technique gains further meaning: it mirrors the way she is viewed by others, symbolically dissected into “parts” to be evaluated. Moreover, Sergio’s refusal to accept her ID card – which, we learn, still bears her pre-transition identity – exposes how social inequality compounds bureaucratic exclusion. Sandra’s experience encapsulates both the limits of inclusion and the persistence of stereotypes: the assumption of falsity or deception projected onto her body.
The Cold Gaze of CCTV
Shots from surveillance cameras punctuate the film. The CCTV images capture conflicts and injustices – for instance, following the conflict when Stefano realises that Sergio has deliberately devalued items to increase profit. These images further exaggerate a sense of cold, detached observation: someone is watching, surveilling, yet no one intervenes. Dionisio and cinematographer Caroline Champetier turn this into a moral question for the viewer, making us, the audience, too, into observing witnesses.
The CCTV becomes most chilling when it captures Michele’s death. As he flees, terrified of being caught, his heart gives out. The footage cuts abruptly to the static security feed, a lifeless image, watching through inaction. The scene transforms surveillance into a metaphor for moral paralysis, forcing us to confront our own role as spectators of inequality.
The Potential for Doubt
Near the end, the shop closes: fans and lights are switched off, the security guard locks the doors. This brief ritual of closure mirrors the opening sequence, confirming that the cycle will repeat: corruption, desperation, are routine, bracketed by opening hours. Yet the film does not end here, but in a kind of “post-script”, in the final auction scene. In it, Stefano appears more polished: suit, tie, confident smile. Has appears to have completed his integration into the corrupt system, following Sergio’s example.
The last time we saw Stefano was in the only domestic sequence in his narrative, at the house of his mother. She, too, is a worker, who must take a night shift; as a result he must collect his young brother from school. She fondly tells him here that his brother looks up to him. As the penultimate time we see the character, it invites us to see this “integration” perhaps as a necessity, for responsibility rather than greed. And yet, the film leaves the question of this choice open. In the final seconds, his smile fades and he looks toward Sergio with bitterness. The ambiguity remains: complicity or doubt? Throughout, the strength of Le ultime cose lies in withholding certainty. Like Sandra’s backstory or Michele’s domestic struggles, meaning is intimated or revealed in fragments. Likewise, this closing scene is not didactic, but expresses potential: empathy, however fragile, still flickers amid systematised injustice.
Conversations
“Intervista a Irene Dionisio”. Via Quinlan.it, Alessandro Aniballi, Raffaele Meale interview the director.
«There were questions I kept asking myself about the issue of debt. I had read a book on the subject called Debt, written by David Graeber, one of the founders of Occupy Wall Street and a professor of economics at Yale. I have a degree in the philosophy of history, so I am interested in these themes. I asked myself which social institution could tell the story of debt, even as moral debt, as guilt. At a certain point, I came to think that the pawnshop was the kind of institution that interested me. I felt the need to go there, also because I had no idea what these places had become in the meantime. I had seen them depicted in Bicycle Thieves and, more generally, in Italian neorealism. Then, of course, there is also The Pawnbroker, but that was an entirely different story. So I went to visit, and I was very impressed.»
Meeting with director Irene Dionisio, discussing the meaning of her film in a time of economic crisis, prepared by Fondazione Milano Scuole Civiche.
“Le ultime cose e il cinema impegnato di Irene Dionisio”. Via La Voce di New York, Viola Brancatella interviews the director.
«My meeting with my director of photography was decisive: she [Caroline Champetier] is a very strong personality with enormous experience. I, on the other hand, was making my first film. We came from two very different backgrounds, but this encounter created, at both a theoretical and cinematic level, the right vision in relation to my directing approach and the camera’s relationship with the director, because the operator is not a machine – often they are a creator in their own right, and I say this because it is fundamental. In our collaboration, we built our own new vocabulary. The film is filtered through her camera; the direction is filtered through the cinematography and vice versa, so from that perspective I am extremely happy. She has worked extensively with directors of the French New Wave (she is a filmmaking great!) so when she told me that, while reading, she thought of a process similar to Bresson’s, her point of view was strong, while I had my own directing vision, and in preparing the film we watched movies together and worked on it extensively».
“Intervista a Irene Dionisio”. Via Quinlan.it, Alessandro Aniballi, Raffaele Meale interview the director.
«I decided to include the surveillance camera in the film while I was still in the preparation and study phase. When I first saw it at the pawnshop, it gave me the sense that the entire location was being observed from above, and that, of course, I was also looking at it that way. But I didn’t want this shot to end up identifying entirely with my gaze, even though it had a similar function, except that it was a non-human gaze. So, according to a specific interpretation, the economic dynamics are human, but at the same time, they are not, because they no longer belong to us. I decided I wanted to allude to this, and I had already included it in the screenplay in some sequences which, for me, provided a temporal balance to the narrative».
Business strategies and communication rhetorics
Strategies
Drawing on experience working on films such as Sponde. Nel sicuro sole del Nord (“Shores. In the Safe Sun of the North”, 2015) and La fabbrica è piena. Tragicommedia in otto atti (“The Factory is Full. Tragicomedy in Eight Acts”, 2011), and fuelled by her passion for the genre, Dionisi originally conceived of Le ultime cose as a documentary, too, before shifting to fiction for reasons of privacy and security. During the months of observation preceding production, the director realised that the people who would have been at the centre of the documentary would never agree to appear on film. Moreover, given the value of the goods stored inside the building, filming in certain sensitive areas was not possible.
Nonetheless, the film retained a documentary spirit, both in terms of its aesthetics and its production approach. This treatment stems from those eight months of observation at a pawnshop, in Turin, and a series of interviews with its visitors and staff. This period of observation also influenced certain casting choices: alongside the main characters played by professional actors, most minor roles were assigned to real patrons of the pawnshop, who agreed to participate under the protective framework of fiction. Working with this type of actor was carried out almost entirely on set, relying on improvisation and authentic recounting of their life experiences.
The idea for the film had been with the director since 2012 (four years before the film’s completion and release) when Dionisio was working on the documentary Sponde. The screenplay took two years to complete, and filming took place over five weeks in Turin, in a space designed to replicate a pawnshop. Beyond safety considerations, the need to abandon the real setting also arose from organizational challenges: no pawnshop was available for filming beyond the weekend, a condition that would have significantly extended the production timeline and budget.
Public Funding
The film was co-produced by RSI – Radiotelevisione Svizzera Italiana and received support from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, MiBACT, and Film Commission Torino Piemonte.
Communication rhetorics
Although not technically her directorial debut, Le ultime cose is the director’s first work in the realm of fiction. This meant that the film faced the typical promotional challenges of such projects, where publicity largely relies on festival presentations and interviews and reviews appearing in the national press.
In this context, particular attention was drawn to the film’s presence at the Critics’ Week at the Venice International Film Festival, where Le ultime cose was the only Italian film selected in 2016. In this setting, emphasis was placed on presenting the film’s overarching theme as a story of class, while topics related to diversity and their intersection with socioeconomic issues were secondary. The transgender protagonist is mentioned in nearly all reviews and many interviews, but her role in the film is never explored in depth. This is reflected in the absence of the film from thematic festivals focusing on gender identity and the LGBTQIA+ community.
The audiovisual promotional materials that exist online on video streaming services, at the present, are relatively few: a handful of trailers, some connected to film festivals, clips and interviews. Following the same rhetoric identified above, the trailer likewise centralizes the economic narrative (it shows all the characters but roots them to Sergio and Stefano), and issues of diversity are not made explicit. The poster, on the other hand, represents only Sandra, lying topless (wearing just a bra) on her bed. The image does not explicitly invoke identity questions related to Sandra’s gender, but her semi-dressed state evidently invokes themes addressed above regarding vulnerability, control and surveillance.
Conversations
“Intervista a Irene Dionisio”. Via Quinlan.it, Alessandro Aniballi, Raffaele Meale interview the director.
«In any case, in my opinion, the weakest aspect of our cinema is its accessibility. Recently, many people have spoken to me about the need for gender quotas, since I am a woman. But I am against them, because there is a deeper problem in our cinema that goes beyond gender issues, and that is nepotism».
“Le ultime cose e il cinema impegnato di Irene Dionisio”. Via La Voce di New York, Viola Brancatella interviews the director.
«DEA, Women and Audiovisual, conducted research on this, and indeed women are less funded, they reach the cinema less easily than men, and are, in fact, worn down. On one hand, there is a huge personal self-censorship, in the sense that women, even while growing up, do not place themselves in positions of power, so to speak, absorbing the culture around us, which is sexist and patriarchal. For example, only now in Walt Disney films do you see female characters who are different: the heroines are skilled at something, they are not just beautiful as in the past, and they are not only princesses. There is an evolution of imagination. Now, finally, women have discovered that their gender role is not fixed, so they are in crisis, just as men are. All of this creates a great difficulty in managing society and in communicating between genders».
Interview with Irene Dionisio about her production experience with Tempesta Film and, more generally, her role as director of the Lovers Film Festival.
“Venezia 73: intervista a Irene Dionisio, regista di Le Ultime Cose”. Su AnonimaCinefili.it, Writers Guild of Italia (a cura di Fosca Gallesio) intervista alla regista.
«In the script, I was sure I wanted to tell the story of the relationship between an appraiser and a client; I understood that this relationship was the key to understanding this place. In fact, an early version of the film had only two characters. Later, I realized that there was something very interesting in the relationship between those who worked inside the pawnshop and those who were outside, the receivers, and I added this element. But my idea is that the film tells the story of four characters, one of which is the pawnshop itself. Eighty percent of the film is set inside the pawnshop, and I always conceived and portrayed it as if it were a character».
Audio interview (with still images) with Irene Dionisio on the production of the film, produced for “Cinema Made in Italy”.
“Intervista a Irene Dionisio”. Su Quinlan.it, Alessandro Aniballi, Raffaele Meale intervista alla regista.
«I find it funny, for example, when someone boasts, saying: “This film cost just five thousand euros, or 150 thousand euros”. It’s not true: those films didn’t actually cost those amounts, because those films were unpaid in a sense – a lot of people didn’t receive compensation. I believe that work should always be paid. Everything else around it – at a more moral level – is another matter. But you must always start from a material basis. If a film cost little, you can’t praise it as if that were an artistic quality, a merit, in itself».
Circulation and audience responses
Circulation patterns
The film was distributed in Italy by Luce Cinecittà, and international sales were handled by the French company Alma Cinema. The film was not released theatrically outside of Italy.
The film achieved good circulation within film festivals, winning four awards, including the Best Actress Prize, “La Prima Cosa Bella”, awarded to Christina Andrea Rosamilia at the Asti International Film Festival. Notably, despite having a transgender protagonist, the film did not participate in any particular thematic festivals on gender identity and the LGBTQIA+ community.
Regarding theatrical distribution, in line with the typical pattern for debut films, Le ultime cose had a limited release in terms of both the number of cinemas and the duration of its screenings. It was screened in 12 cinemas across 11 cities for a period ranging from one to two weeks, depending on the venues. During this period, four special screenings were organised in the presence of the cast and director.Television broadcasts were also limited, with two screenings on Rai 5, one of which was during prime time. The participation of RSI as one of the producers also facilitated the film’s airing on television in Italian-speaking Switzerland, although the number of screenings remained very limited. The film’s presence on streaming platforms is similarly restricted: Le ultime cose is available exclusively on RaiPlay, with no other European catalogue recorded.
Festivals (Selection)
2024
Mubi Fest | Le Prime Volte.
2023
Femminile Plurale | Panorama.
2022
Festival of Italian Film in Villerupt | Theme, Voci Italiane Contemporanee | Panorama.
2019
Sergio Amidei Award | Retrospective “Registe, antropologhe, osservatrici”.
2018
Cinecittà Film Festival | Panorama, Valsusa Filmfest | Panorama, European Film Festival of Lecce | In Competition, “Mario Verdone” Award.
2017
L’Italia Che Non Si Vede | Panorama, SIFF’s Cinema Italian Style | Panorama, A Tutto Schermo | Panorama, Labour Film Festival | LABOUR.film, Bobbio Film Festival | Panorama, Mantua Film Fest | First Feature Competition, Bimbi Belli | Competition, Cagliari Film Festival | Panorama, Ceau, Cinema! Festival of Buzău | Competition, Durban International Film Festival | Feature Films, Flaiano Film Festival – Flaiano International Awards | Italian Competition, First Feature Award, Gallio Film Festival | Competition, Santa Croce Effetto Notte – For Italian Cinema | Panorama, Cinema Made in Italy Copenhagen | Panorama, OPEN ROADS: New Italian Cinema | Panorama, Ciak sul Lavoro. Il Lavoro si Rappresenta | Panorama, 8½ Italian Cinema Festival | Altre Visioni, Moscow International Film Festival | Time of Women, Movie Tellers – La Carovana del Cinema | Panorama, Semana de Cine Italiano Buenos Aires | Panorama, WorldFest – Houston Independent Film Festival | Feature Film, BIF&ST – Bari International Film & TV Festival | ItaliaFilmFest / First and Second Features, Italian Film Festival London – Cinema Made in Italy | Panorama, Univercine Italian Cinema | Competition, Gothenburg Film Festival | Nya Roster, Solothurn Film Festival – Giornate di Soletta | Pan Fic.
2016
Corto Dorico | Salto in Lungo, Italian Cinema Showcase Barcelona | Feature Films, Primo Piano sull’Autore – Pianeta Donna | Where is Italian Cinema Going?, Italian Cinema Appointment in Istanbul | Panorama, DocumentaMy – Un Posto nel Mondo Doc Festival | Panorama, MittelCinemaFest | Panorama, Italian Cinema Encounters in Toulouse | In Competition, Carbonia Film Festival | Panorama, Festival of Italian Film in Villerupt | Competition, Le Giornate della Mostra in Veneto | Panorama, Saison Culturelle | Around the World in 50 Films, From Venice to Rome and Lazio | Panorama, La Settimana della Critica in Veneto | Panorama, Le Vie del Cinema – Milan | Panorama, Will Our Heroes Succeed? The New Authors of Italian Cinema | Panorama, Venice International Film Festival | International Film Critics’ Week.
Awards
2017
Cagliari Film Festival (festival): Special Mention from the Tina Modotti Cultural Association.
Nastri d’Argento (competition): “SIAE” Nastri d’Argento Award (Irene Dionisio).
BAFF – Busto Arsizio Film Festival (festival): “Made in Italy” Il Giornale First Feature Award.
Univercine Cinema Italien (festival): Univerciné Jury Prize.
2016
Asti International Film Festival (festival): Best Actress Award “La Prima Cosa Bella” (Christina Andrea Rosamilia), Best Director Award “La Prima Cosa Bella” (Irene Dionisio).
Festival of Italian Film in Villerupt (festival): Amilcar Jury Prize.
Reception
The reception of Le ultime cose is somewhat limited, doubtless due to its restricted circulation (see above). In total, the film grossed around €30,000 for around 7500 tickets sold. Reviews of the film are broadly positive, though trends are limited by small numbers. Data on the Italian site MyMovies, for example, has an average rating of 3.26/5 for the film, though this translates to an audience score of 3.48 and a critics score of 2.80. The average rating of the film on IMDb is 5.4 from 105 reviews; Letterboxd records 159 viewings but just 10 reviews. It is nonetheless striking that, on the same site, the film features on 153 user-made film lists, many of which dedicated to issues of gender (LGBTQ+ or trans characters; women directors) in and beyond Italy, as well as curated lists of RaiPlay content, demonstrating that these remain frames of understanding of Le ultime cose.
Within reviews, Le ultime cose was received as a quietly radical debut, marked by both moral urgency and formal restraint. Critics recognised in it a revival of a “neo-neorealist” ethos, linking its unsparing portrait of poverty and bureaucracy to the lineage of De Sica and Rossellini, yet filtered through the austerity of contemporary Eastern European realism. The film’s setting is interpreted as emblematic of post-crisis Italy: a closed microcosm where debt, shame and survival intertwine. Reviewers praised Dionisio’s lucid gaze and the film’s unembellished visual style, which expose systemic precarity without sentimentality. Her documentary background is also widely noted and anchored to a source of authenticity, the camera functioning as both witness and instrument of social critique.
Several reviews also reveal some ambivalence: the narrative’s moral dichotomies and rigid structure were felt to limit emotional complexity, and its controlled mise-en-scène risked claustrophobia or repetition. Some regarded these very constraints as integral to its vision of stasis and entrapment, others as signs of a first-time director still negotiating tone and rhythm. Dionisio’s lack of experience in fiction filmmaking is also tied to critiques of the lack of background information provided about the characters – this, for example, emerges in the few user reviews on aggregator websites. Nevertheless, the film is consistently interpreted as a sign of great promise for the director, and there is critical consensus about the incredibly talented performances of the actors.
While critics acknowledged the film’s attention to social marginality, the representation of diversity – embodied in Sandra’s character – was treated only peripherally. Reviews noted her presence as part of the film’s broader portrait of economic precarity but rarely engaged with her gender identity in depth, often describing her storyline as underdeveloped or filtered through familiar tropes rather than explored as a fully realised perspective on difference.
Italian and foreign press
Italian Press
Paola Casella, “Le ultime cose – Recensione”, MYmovies.it, 29 September 2016.
«It is therefore a kind of neo-neorealism that Irene Dionisio practices, one that carries within it the legacy of De Sica and Rossellini, but also the passage that Italian neorealism has made through more recent cinematographies such as the Romanian one: proof that the story of ordinary squalor and bureaucratic odysseys, which once seemed distant from us, now belongs to us, both cinematically and existentially. Dionisio recounts this quiet torment with restraint and dry-eyed poise, clearly delineating its spaces, tackling uncomfortable themes without concessions to audience taste, sometimes through the aseptic gaze of those video cameras that uncritically record the passages of our daily lives and only take interest when they witness a committed crime, never a suffered one. Her clear direction is a testament to courage, going straight to the heart of the problem and to the audience that will be able to follow it, as it deserves».
Simone Emiliani, “Le ultime cose”, Sentieri Selvaggi, 1 October 2016.
«There is a hidden and sick tension in Le ultime cose, especially at the writing level, but Dionisio manifests it through an overt claustrophobia, also looking at the zones of Ciprì (the pawnshop as the post office in È stato il figlio, which shares with this film the presence of Fabrizio Falco) and the surgical precision of a kind of sick noir that perhaps recalls the model of Gomorra. The excessive characterization becomes cumbersome and is visible even in the performance of one of the finest Italian actors, Roberto De Francesco, who here instead becomes almost a kind of puppet-body, or in the repetition of gestures and exchanges of glances that become repetitive»
Giampietro Balia, “The Last Things: The redemption of the poorest”, Cineuropa, 7 September 2016.
«Le ultime cose is a film about economic and moral debt: the private debt of the individuals becomes an existentially ethical issue for the whole of society. Shame is a central aspect of the film: the individuals pawning their valuables feel guilty for being in this position of asking for money, and their only moral redemption is to pay back their debt. Dionisio’s attention to the plight of the poorest members of the community and her use of the documentary form are confirmed by a copy of The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet hanging from the wall of the pawnshop. Falco’s character is probably the most conflicted one: he’s in a rueful plight, torn between following his supervisor’s orders and listening to his conscience. His daily chore is to be an equilibrist treading the fine line that separates what is morally acceptable from what is not. The pawnshop becomes the fourth character, one that swallows the lives of the people who walk in with the same voracious greed used to lock up objects of value in the safe»
Cristina Cocco, “Cinema Made in Italy: Irene Dionisio, Pawn Streets (Le Ultime Cose)”, Drive-in Magazine, 13 April 2017.
«Set in the almost Dickensian confines of a modern Pawnbrokers, Le Ultime Cose depicts the lives of several different characters who are all variously forced by personal circumstances and lack of any public help into pawnbrokers to part with precious things».
Alessandra Levantesi Kezich, “Le ultime cose”, La Stampa, 29 September 2016.
«It is clear that Dionisio lacks experience, and at times the structure feels rigid; nonetheless, her debut is appreciable for the strong choice of theme and the attentive and honest gaze focused on things and those who inhabit them»
Paolo D’Agostini, “Le ultime cose”, La Repubblica, 29 September 2016. Quote from MyMovies.
«A penetrating gaze without simplifications or easy narrative solutions. A work in which the director chooses the more difficult path: observing and letting spaces and gestures speak, more than words».
Redazione, “Le ultime cose – Recensione”, CiakMagazine, 9 September 2016.
«Despite its noble intention, Le ultime cose is full of flaws that some Italian filmmakers struggle to overcome: the gaze is schematic, and from the first scenes the viewer can guess who the good and bad characters are, and especially who one is forced to empathize with. There is no breathing room, no nuance in the characters. The director immediately imposes her point of view, manifesting explicitly her indignation for the universe she wants to portray»
Luigi Locatelli, “Recensione: Le ultime cose di Irene Dionisio, il miglior film italiano visto a Venezia 2016”, Nuovo Cinema Locatelli, 4 October 2016.
«A livid tableau, of utter squalor and despair. At times it seems as if one is in an unrelenting Romanian film by Mungiu or in one of the even tougher productions of the Bulgarian new wave, like The Lesson or the 2016 Locarno winner Godless».