{"id":541004,"date":"2026-07-14T13:19:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T13:19:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/541004\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T13:19:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T13:19:13","slug":"the-kidnapping-of-arabella-review-taken-by-way-of-the-coens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/541004\/","title":{"rendered":"The Kidnapping Of Arabella review: Taken by way of the Coens"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are myriad means by which a child can break you: your patience, your concentration, your heart. In her sophomore feature, The Kidnapping Of Arabella, Amanda<\/a> writer-director Carolina Cavalli coolly folds each of these sensations together, inseparable as they are from one another. It doesn\u2019t matter whether the kid is yours or someone else\u2019s, whether you\u2019re their rightful caregiver or\u2014in the film\u2019s case\u2014simply a nearby sucker. To have custody of a kid is to risk exposure to such agonies as public temper tantrums; blatant, defiant sass; and, despite these, a serious case of wistful melancholy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cavalli nestles her plot in a satirical riff on a universal parents\u2019 nightmare: their child\u2019s seizure by an unknown party. The child, obviously, is Arabella (Lucrezia Guglielmino); the party is Holly (Benedetta Porcaroli). Just going by the typical assumptions around said dread scenarios, one imagines Holly luring Arabella into her car with a fistful of fries, but The Kidnapping Of Arabella swaps the power dynamic and selects Holly as Arabella\u2019s mark. The girl is cross with her father, Orest (Chris Pine), a celebrated author who drags her along to a glitzy function thrown to honor his work\u2014you know, kid\u2019s stuff. Arabella wants only for takeout from her favorite fast food joint, Taco King, and in punishment for denying her, she spends the night yowling at the top of her lungs as Orest attempts to perform a reading from his latest book\u2014an autobiography of sorts, it seems, about his upbringing in the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cTaco King!\u201d Arabella yells. \u201cTaxes! Jonathan Franzen!\u201d (Orest appears to both have a gauzy relationship with government levies as well as a burning jealousy of his American peer, in one of the film\u2019s best running gags.) Eventually the event winds down and Orest, having exhausted his composure, instructs his driver to give Arabella what she wants. Because The Kidnapping Of Arabella is primed to focus on adult derelictions of duty, the driver promptly wanders off and leaves the child alone. Then she spies Holly and selects her as her abductor; from the outset, it\u2019s abundantly clear that Arabella has an even greater facility than most kids for telling adults what they want to hear, and Holly, burdened as she is by the weight of her childhood failures, instantly sees the girl as her younger self, come from the past for an existential do-over.<\/p>\n

The Kidnapping Of Arabella is at once explicit and mum on the subject of Holly\u2019s mental health troubles, something Porcaroli captures in her doe-eyed and restless performance. This is a person whose toxic youth so profoundly scarred her that Arabella is, to her, more an opportunity to make good on her own promise as a child than a misplaced and unsupervised kid in her own right. Holly had it impressed upon her as a girl, by her would-be dance teacher, Granatina (Eva Robin\u2019s), that she was special, an honorific that haunts her as a grown-up working an unsatisfying job while she completes her physics degree. Cavalli leaves the truth of Holly\u2019s academic pursuits fuzzy, as if to invite the audience to question whether she\u2019s actually a student or maybe just a neurotic woman-child seeking any possible relief from her embarrassment at amounting to less than she was told she\u2019d be. What\u2019s unquestionable is that she\u2019s unhappy and unfulfilled, and Arabella\u2019s keen empathetic instincts\u2014plus her urge to put Orest through the wringer\u2014pick up Holly\u2019s despondency like military-grade sonar.<\/p>\n

Cavalli has a terrific sense of humor and a droll aesthetic, seemingly drawing from an influential well filled by drops of Wes Anderson<\/a>, Jim Jarmusch, Sofia Coppola, and the Coen brothers<\/a>. The Kidnapping Of Arabella also sets a high bar for road trip films: the journey is worthier than the destination, as it should be, but specifically because the film\u2019s journey lives up to every definition of the word on philosophical, comical, and emotional levels. Holly accepts guardianship of Arabelle the minute the girl gets into her car, though it does take time for the gravity of that responsibility to sink in; Arabella isn\u2019t Holly\u2019s kid, but she is her ward, and as much as Arabella is a pain in the ass (\u201crompicazzo\u201d in Italian; congratulations, you have been cultured), she\u2019s also an adorable moppet, invested with guileless wisdom by Guglielmino. It\u2019s difficult to hold her actions against her. Besides: Holly really ought to know better.<\/p>\n

The fact that she doesn\u2019t is the key to The Kidnapping Of Arabella\u2018s chief motif: Children with unrealized potential eventually become adults with dissatisfying lives. Holly should understand, among other things, that time travel isn\u2019t real, that Arabella isn\u2019t her eight-year-old self, and that even if she is, the correct thing to do is to take her back to Orest, even if Orest\u2014played with wonderful laconic weariness by the best movie star named \u201cChris\u201d\u2014is about as far down the list of \u201cfather of the year\u201d candidates as one can get before they hit Elon Musk. But she\u2019s blinded by her perceived inadequacies, and makes the absolute worst choice available, which, at least, leads to a pretty good film.<\/p>\n

Director: Carolina Cavalli
Writer: Carolina Cavalli
Starring: Benedetta Porcaroli, Lucrezia Guglielmino, Chris Pine, Eva Robin\u2019s
Release Date: July 10, 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are myriad means by which a child can break you: your patience, your concentration, your heart. In…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":541005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-541004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/541005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}