Metacritic reviews

Italian Studies is a striking mix of open-hearted storytelling and atmospheric filmmaking, with an overall confidence from Leon and Kirby that’s more pronounced than the script’s slippery nature.

The wistful feelings it generates about a world allowed to keep moving coexist alongside an uneasy evocation of brain fog, an easy stand-in for either a zombified endemic state or a specific long-COVID symptom—take your pick. Whatever the original motivation, Leon appears to sense, after a couple of sweet slice-of-life capers, that you can’t keep walking and talking forever.

It’s an odd sort of travelogue Leon and Kirby curate here, but Italian Studies’ drifting, artsy peculiarities make 70 minutes fly by with a palliative affection—for Alina, for New York and for all the intersecting stories contained within its bounds.

While it may raise more questions than answers and not quite cohere as a whole, the film nevertheless is poetic and at times breathtakingly beautiful, anchored by a superb cast.

The barrier between the real and the fictional encounters is increasingly permeable, as is the line between social norms and unacceptable behaviour, in this freewheeling, spontaneous voyage into the unknown.

This is a film about an artist who forgets herself, made by an artist trying to do the same, and with the help of an actress looking for an anchor of truth to hold onto right when the tides of stardom are threatening to pull her out to sea.

Italian Studies disorients the viewer for an experience that has moments of singularity, though it can’t hide from its disjointed nature. But it’s different, and that has definitive value.

During an amnesiac’s atmospheric nighttime ramble through Manhattan, the seeds of a narrative are sewn but never nurtured.

The film trades the agreeably limber storytelling and seeming spontaneity of Leon’s previous work for a narrative both aimless and inert.

Leon imbues the film with an uncertain sense of dread, but he doesn’t lead the story or its protagonist anywhere worthwhile. It’s as though the narrative was designed specifically to capture the feeling of being lost in the city and what that might do to someone, but there’s very little exploration of Alina’s interiority for it to be satisfying.