SOURCE: Mathews, Jack. “Bertolucci's Beauty Searches for Identity, '60s Idealism.” Los Angeles Times (21 June 1996): 6.

In the following review, Mathews notes several faults in Stealing Beauty, but argues that any Bertolucci film is a welcome event.

When the young American Lucy Harmon (Liv Tyler) arrives at the Tuscan farm where she was conceived two decades earlier, she finds everyone there in the midst of a lazy, mid-afternoon nap. What follows is an awakening in more ways than one.

This opening to Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty is as gentle a metaphor as one could imagine, and one that seems to say as much about the filmmaker as the film. Stealing Beauty, which follows Lucy on her search for her biological father and on her mission to lose her virginity, marks the 56-year-old filmmaker's return to his native Italy, following a 15-year voluntary exile, and a return, of sorts, to...