Ballo a tre passi

To appreciate Salvatore Mereu's handsome, slowly unfolding film, set in contemporary Sardinia, be prepared for a movie that plunks you into a rural, primitive environment with a much slower metabolism than the nerve-jangling world of instant communications. Jets may roar overhead, and glamorous international nomads take the sun at a beachfront resort. But over most of the Sardinia's beautiful, rugged landscape, life goes on pretty much as it always has, and most the characters seem barely cognizant of creeping globalization. Consisting of four, loosely connected vignettes, each set in a different season, "Three Step Dancing" parachutes you in to this world and demands that you to fend for yourself. At its most absorbing, the movie has the pace and patient, nonjudgmental gaze of a Taviani Brothers epic that slows time and observes the procession of life without comment. — Stephen Holden, The New York Times