For those who find "The Tree of Life" too mainstream and commercial, we now have "Le Quattro Volte." It's a quiet, meditative film from Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino. There is no dialogue.

You’ll hear words being spoken in Michelangelo Frammartino’s extraordinary second feature, “Le Quattro Volte,” but none that require translation or subtitling. That’s because human beings are merely ...

Grave, beautiful, austerely comic and casually metempsychotic, Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) is one of the wiggiest nature documentaries — or almost-documentaries — ever ...

Le Quattro Volte will mess with your perceptions. No hallucinogenic drug or psychedelic trip, this movie creates a heightened sense of reality by slowing actions and narrative down, simplifying them ...

The substance of Le Quattro Volte is a life cycle in rural Italy — Calabria, to be exact, where Pythagoras once spent some time working out his idea about the transmigration of the soul from human to ...

There is no objectivity in film criticism, so let’s be honest; we all have, for whatever reasons, our own drivers and motivations, genres and styles that we find to be more meaningful and effective ...

Take down four or five streetlights, remove a scattering of TV antennas, scrape off the asphalt from twisty narrow streets, and the Calabrian mountainside village of Caulonia would look virtually as ...

A spiritual meditation with the appearance of a documentary, Michelangelo Frammartino's "Le Quattro Volte" is an examination of the link between the human, animal, vegetable and mineral realms - and ...

Technically a March release (it opens today at New York’s Film Forum), “Volte” is a visually stunning, almost entirely silent Italian fable that works as a mediation on life and death told through ...

The meditative "Le Quattro Volte" is taken up with small events occurring in a tucked-away corner of the world - an aged Calabrian goat herder dies, a goat is born, a tree is cut down for a village ...

As an object of cinematic contemplation, Michelangelo Frammartino’s four-handed pantomime is lovely to look at, interesting to ponder, and, ultimately, less profound than it seems to thinks it is. Men ...