Lina Wertmuller's The Lizards explores the urgent, if familiar, problem of the sloth and paralysis of the Italian South, the encrusted feudalism and snide Fascism….

Because it's a good film let's tot up the debit side first, to get it over with. First of all the film hasn't enough to say that's new if one's seen I Vitelloni or I Nuovi Angeli; it's a more sensitive, more prolonged evocation, with a tinge of pessimistic irony. Second, Lina Wertmuller, like others in Italy's new wave of neo-neo-realism …, sometimes indulges a slowpaced aestheticism that saps the vitality of the story….

Having said which, let's add that The Lizards has the virtues of its faults, and in abundance, developed to the nth degree of refinement. There are images so beautiful and so simple that one literally catches one's breath. The director has the quite uncanny precision, the magical control over location...