Finally Dawn

Finally Dawn is a surreal vision of coming-in-age via cinema, and [Lily] James fully sells the movie star mayhem at its center. But it can't overcome its meandering script and hollow depiction of the era.

Saverio Costanzo seems to throw more and more ideas at the page with the growing desperation of adding new toppings to mask a bad pizza.

A flawed but impressive movie about movies.

Not a terribly profound film, but delivered with real brio.

The performers in “Finally Dawn” are its weakest feature: big and broad, prone to pantomime, clashing with whatever it is their colleagues are doing.

A sprawling story of uncertain tone -- sometimes thrilled, sometimes appalled and sometimes as generally bewildered as nervous ingenue Mimosa.

The Italian director chooses to enlist a series of shining American names to this multicultural affair, hanging his film by a thread on the fine line between European arthouse and American mainstream without ever committing to one side or the other.

with an absurdly didactic screenplay awash in multiple stereotypes, it falls short of its apparent influences (primarily Fellini and Sirk) and turns into a handsome old-fashioned drama with no resonance beyond the surface.

One could make the joke that by the time “Finally Dawn” ends, the sigh of relief is “finally over.” The film is just such an excruciatingly tiresome effort.

Its circuitous nature sometimes feels taxing, especially as concerns some of the American actors... And yet, Costanzo’s film exudes a serpentine quality which unfolds like the adaptation of a fascinating, dense novel.