{"id":808762,"date":"2026-07-17T22:15:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T22:15:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/808762\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T22:15:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T22:15:13","slug":"the-kidnapping-of-arabella-review-chris-pine-goes-italian-in-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/808762\/","title":{"rendered":"The Kidnapping of Arabella Review: Chris Pine Goes Italian in Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carolina Cavalli<\/a>\u2019s \u201cThe Kidnapping of Arabella<\/a>\u201d opens with one of the single most surprising things I\u2019ve seen and\/or heard in a movie this year: Chris Pine<\/a>, swagged out in a skin-tight suit that makes him look like a yassified Nick Cave, seething with jealousy over Jonathan Franzen in seemingly perfect Italian. <\/p>\n

As I understand it, the Los Angeles-born actor<\/a> began studying the language because he wanted to be cast in an Italian film<\/a>, as opposed to being cast in an Italian film that required him to study the language. Mission accomplished! <\/p>\n

Better yet, the unexpected nature of Pine\u2019s casting performs a crucial service for the eccentric and playfully contrived road trip misadventure in which he\u2019s been cast: Once you accept that the guy from \u201cDungeons & Dragons\u201d could successfully moonlight as the next breakout star of commedie all\u2019italiana, even the most far-fetched aspects of Cavalli\u2019s film demand to be taken at face value.\u00a0That buy-in proves essential to a movie whose premise requires you to suspend every iota of your disbelief, lest its Lanthimos-lite approach to child abduction curdle into something much darker. <\/p>\n

\"I<\/a> \"14th.<\/a> <\/p>\n

The child in question is seven-year-old Arabella (a wonderful Lucrezia Guglielmino, brimming with puckish sincerity), the eldest and only child of the writer Oreste D. \u2014 a conspicuous character name in a film that\u2019s being released opposite \u201cThe Odyssey.\u201d Does little Arabella care about going to another stuffy awards dinner with her pompous dad? She does not. The only thing Arabella cares about is going to a local fast food restaurant called Taco King. Eventually, she complains enough that Oreste D. tasks his driver with taking her there, if only so he can have a few moments of peace.\u00a0<\/p>\n

No such luck. Unsupervised in the parking lot outside Taco King, Arabella is discovered by a lightly deranged twentysomething named Holly (Benedetta Porcaroli, who starred in Cavalli\u2019s debut \u201cAmanda<\/a>,\u201d and bears an uncanny resemblance to \u201cDogtooth<\/a>\u201d actress Ariane Labed), who\u2019s busy crashing out over her life\u2019s unrealized potential. <\/p>\n

Told as a child that she would grow up to become a great ballerina, Holly now works at a rundown ice rink in Veneto that she likes to describe as a gigantic frozen butthole. Cursing her crooked stars as she watches Arabella fake a limp for attention just like she used to do, Holly naturally leaps to the conclusion that this must be a \u201cBig\u201d situation, and that the little girl hobbling around in front of her is a younger version of herself. Arabella feeds this delusion by picking up on the vibe, reading the grown-up\u2019s nametag, and insisting that her name is Holly too.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Arabella wants someone to take her seriously. Holly wants a do-over. Running away together is the only reasonable solution. \u201cThis can be our opportunity to become someone special,\u201d Holly says in an effort to sell her semi-willing captive on the whole idea,\u201d and Cavalli\u2019s offbeat character piece takes its heroine at her word. \u201cThe Kidnapping of Arabella\u201d might cleave a bit closer in tone (dry) and humor (deadpan) to the likes of \u201cNapoleon Dynamite\u201d or Babak Jalali\u2019s recent Sundance gem \u201cFremont\u201d (which Cavalli co-wrote, a collaboration that continues with Jalali serving as editor here), but its pace honors the freewheeling spirit of Italian classics like \u201cIl Sorpasso.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this case, that doesn\u2019t mean \u201cfast\u201d so much as \u201cerratically picaresque,\u201d as Holly and Arabella crash weddings for a sense of belonging, stay at a motel under the alias \u201cBrittany the Pooh,\u201d and then later shack up in a spare room with a deaf goat. There\u2019s an archness to all of these interludes that can fall flat whenever the film swerves back to its supporting characters (which include a cop sympathetic to Holly\u2019s cause, and Oreste D. himself, who spends the rest of the story crying into a sex worker\u2019s lap while mordantly contemplating suicide), but Porcaroli and Guglielmino are both spiky enough to resist the temptation for monotone, and the jaunty soundtrack layers everything with a casual patina of cool that keeps the movie from tacking too far in any direction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a vibe, to be honest, and that vibeness filters everything we see \u2014\u00a0from tortured flashbacks to a hilarious visual gag that hinges on a \u201cLorenzo Lotto\u201d painting \u2014 through the seriocomic angst of Holly\u2019s self-frustration. Porcaroli\u2019s performance leans into that embittered narcissism even when it hurts, but embittered narcissism comes naturally to a story about a woman who\u2019s at least semi-convinced that she\u2019s on the lam with her own mini-me, and there\u2019s something ineffably tender and selfless to the idea that Holly doesn\u2019t want the little girl to become \u201cthe wrong version\u201d of herself. \u201cIt takes so little to keep you from living the right life anymore,\u201d she laments, \u201cand the worst part is you can still imagine it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all too easy these days to be tormented by the roads not taken, and while Cavalli prefers to set her film in an unspecified \u201canytime\u201d that\u2019s largely absent the trappings of modern tech (a choice that forfeits a sharper touch in favor of a more generalized charm), \u201cThe Kidnapping of Arabella\u201d arrives at a satisfying destination because it finds a certain peace in the knotted fabric of space and time. <\/p>\n

\u201cToo many things don\u2019t add up in this story,\u201d Holly says to herself after seeing Arabella for the first time, but \u2014\u00a0like the once-ridiculous notion that, in another life, \u201cThis Means War\u201d hunk Chris Pine<\/a> could have been the next Vittorio Gassman \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s always the things that don\u2019t add up that that make our stories worth telling.<\/p>\n

Grade: B-<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Kidnapping of Arabella\u201d is now playing in theaters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Carolina Cavalli\u2019s \u201cThe Kidnapping of Arabella\u201d opens with one of the single most surprising things I\u2019ve seen and\/or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":808763,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,283885,182197,75,1554,337,209,283886],"class_list":["post-808762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-carolina-cavalli","tag-chris-pine","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-the-kidnapping-of-arabella"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=808762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/808763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=808762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=808762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=808762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}