Genova

After A Mighty Heart, Michael Winterbottom is back collaborating with his co-writer from Wonderland, Laurence Coriat, on this tale of a widower, Joe (Colin Firth), raising two daughters after his wife Marianne (Hope Davis) is killed in a car accident in snowy Illinois.

Bereaved, of course, but determined to keep strong for his daughters, Joe accepts a year-long academic post in Genova, where he finds himself muddled up in a couple of flirtations - first with a frisky student named Rosa (Margherita Romeo) and then with the icy Barbara (Catherine Keener), a former classmate at Harvard with whom there has always been an undercurrent of something a little more red-blooded than Barbara might acknowledge.

Joe's daughters, meanwhile, are still dealing with their loss. For Kelly (Willa Holland) this means teenage rebellion, scooters and boys. For Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) it's the nagging suspicion that she somehow caused her mother's death - a feeling not diluted by the fact that she sees ghostly visions of Davis.

Genova is a strange film, beautiful to look at, a little rambling, and concerning itself with the way the weight of the past - here implied by Davis but more represented by the antiquity of the city itself - meets the needs of the present.

The vibrancy, and the real clout, comes from Joe's daughters, especially Haney-Jardine, who brings a newness, intelligence and pep to what otherwise might have become a rather muddy film. ·