Sisterhood in an Italian asylum

She charts a rebellious course

In Like Crazy, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi plays a woman who has been committed to a mental institution, but never drops the hauteur that she brings with her. For Tedeschi's Beatrice, the institution resembles a family estate over which she (not the doctors or nurses) presides. Director Paolo Virzi also introduces us to Donatella (Micaela Ramazzotti), a new patient who initially resists Beatrice's guidance, but who eventually falls under the older woman's spell. Viewers may not be able to resist comparisons to Thelma & Louise, a better picture about two women on a journey toward independence. Like Crazy eventually provides Beatrice and Donatella with an opportunity to escape the institution; they have adventures as the screenplay hints at a dark secret that torments Donatella. The two actresses keep the movie percolating, but the delusional Beatrice becomes a handful for everyone she encounters -- and that includes an audience that may find her incessant chatter a bit much. Virzi doesn't seem to solve the movie's problem; i.e., defining a line between mad and sane behavior. Instead, he opts for a tale of sisterhood marked by intermittent charm and an always refreshing dash of Cuckoo's Nest rebellion.

Striving in a suburb of Milan

It's possible to argue that we live in a time when soap opera has replaced social criticism. You'll find trace elements of this trend in even the best of episodic TV and also in movies such as Paolo Virzi's Human Capital. The movie brings various economic classes together for a story that includes a buffoonish real-estate agent (Fabrizio Bentivoglio), a wealthy hedge fund billionaire (Fabrizio Gifuni) and his former-actress wife (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi). The lives of these and a variety of other characters become entangled as Virzi examines the ways in which ambition and greed spawn their own brand of misery. Virzi tells his story from different vantage points that revolve around events that transpire after a bicyclist dies when he's run off the road by an unidentified driver. The drama extends into the younger generation as we learn more about the real-estate agent's daughter (Matilde Gioli), a young woman who's breaking up her relationship with the billionaire's son (Guglielmo Pinelli). Virzi's use of multiple viewpoints doesn't exactly result in Rashomon-like revelations, but it produces an engaging look at those who live the good life or aspire to it. It falls to Gioli's Serena and a teen-aged outsider (Giovanni Anzaldo) to try to escape from the vice-like grip of social aspiration. Enjoyable and just trenchant enough to keep all that soap opera from overflowing.