["The Garden of the Finzi Continis"] is certainly the best film that Vittorio De Sica has made in years, but the shabby habits he acquired when directing such things as "Sunflower" and "A Place for Lovers" keep intruding upon this new, much more ambitious work to render it less affecting than it has every right to be.

Mr. De Sica's way with end-of-an-era romance is to shoot almost everything in soft focus, as if he didn't trust the validity of the emotions in what seems to be a perfectly decent screenplay. The film's mood of impending doom is not discovered by the viewer, but imposed on him, by a syrupy musical score and by a camera that keeps panning to and from the sky, and shots of the sun, seen through the same sort of treetops that hover over the actors in the world of Newport cigarettes.

This...