Bellocchio deals in the deeply personal yet somehow not in the private; there is a vital robustness to his methods, and the new film, despite facing intractable problems from long ago... feels sociable and even touched with laughter.

“Marx Can Wait” is entirely absorbed in the faces, voices and personalities of Bellocchio’s brothers and sisters, present and absent, but it also feels, by implication or osmosis, to be telling the story of Italy in the past half century.

A crucial and profound addition to the filmography of one of the greatest living filmmakers, and it ends with a loving reconciliation with the past that is so moving and so convincing because it is so hard-won.

Religion stays with Bellocchio, as does imagination and ingenuity, which makes Marx Can Wait an extraordinary document of the moral evolution of an artist and his family.