I'll tell you why so serious

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

I saw this on TV after the guide gave it a good review, and I was vastly disappointed. It was as if the film makers had plotted out the characters' lives in excruciating detail, taking care to include all the mundane parts and not place any emphasis on any part that might give an insight into the characters' emotions, then took random bits from this time line, and that's what wound up on the screen. There are many scenes which lasted not much more than a minute, and which seemed completely pointless.It felt much longer than the quite short running time, and I didn't care a bit about any of the characters except the younger daughter, or see any point to what I had been shown. It did remind me a little of "Don't Look Now", which is not a good thing (I definitely wanted those two hours of my life back) although it didn't have the older movie's staggeringly moronic twist ending ... or any kind of twist, really. It plods for 90 minutes then just stops.Avoid.

Why the hell was this made? I will never get any of this time back. My life is worse because of this movie. Not because the movie made it worse, but because I could have done something productive with the time. It's barely a travelogue. It's got no plot. It's got no dialogue. The story is stupid. The acting is barely adequate.Don't waste your time with this. It lacks substance. The best thing I can say is the teen girl is very pretty so you have something to look at, at times. Catherine Keener is really just not a good actress, she seems to play the same character in everything she does. She's got some kind of whiskey voice, too.Colin Firth is his usual, British, self. Nothing special.

Michael Winterbottom is the king of the low budget art house film, but here he goes too far. Genoa is clearly a cheap European city in which to film and it is used as the main backdrop as if the fourth actor along with the father (Colin Firth) and his two daughters. Narrow Medieval streets and alleys, ancient churches and some modest beaches have a level of interest, but too much is drab like the dark apartment where they stay. Of course, as with Winterbottom you get some fabulous depth of emotion between the cast, but the unexceptional settings starts to wear and your attention wanders, rather like the young daughters in the film....

Tragedy strikes and Joe (Colin Firth) whisks his two daughters off to Italy for "A Summer in Genoa". Not a fun-filled holiday but an attempt to rebuild their lives after the mother dies. The positive reviews refer to this as a film stripped down to the bare realities of life, I refer to it more as a film stripped down to nothing.Flat dialogue removes the life of the still living characters who have become nothing but embodiments of guilt and the aftermath of a tragedy. There is nothing but the element of loss to connect us to these characters, and I need more than that. An overwhelming soundtrack of sad and dramatic scores, Italian music and background noise prepare us for even more devastating events but quick cuts then always bring us back to the same space we were in before.This is an experienced filmmaker who knows that simple scenes with only a sleight of hand can tell us so much, but I believe that only works when there is more than nothing happening in the film. It's also a film with a great look for its low budget, but it does not show off the beauty of Genoa (or Genova in Italian).If you're looking for a small, raw film about loss, then "A Summer in Genoa" is actually good. But I want and need more than just examples of guilt and sadness in movies.