Marco Bellocchio’s cinematic tour-de-force portrait of Benito Mussolini, and the fiery woman who was his secret wife is garnering some distinct praise after its opening this weekend.

Manohla Dargis of the NY Times calls it an “aesthetically exhilarating howl of a film,” continuing to point out that “the veteran Italian director Marco Bellocchio brilliantly personalizes Mussolini’s rise to power through a fictional retelling of his seduction and catastrophically violent betrayal of his reputed first wife, Ida Dalser. Like much of Italy, Dalser abandoned herself to him body and soul.”

Andrew O’Hehir of Salon: “This eye-popping, quasi-historical collage film stars the gorgeous Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Il Duce’s first love…the knockout new film by Marco Bellocchio, who might be the greatest living Italian director but at age 70 remains almost totally unknown on this side of the Atlantic. Sometimes it feels utterly pointless to call out yet another artfully made foreign-language flick amid the unending stream of pop-clutter. I get it: You’ve barely got time to answer work e-mails and read your friends’ Facebook posts. Some Italian movie you’ve never heard of? Forget it. Well, if you care about movies, I’m telling you to carve out time for “Vincere,” a strange and powerful blend of historical fact and dreamlike imagination that captures both the charisma and the murderous madness of the young Benito Mussolini.”

Ella Taylor of NPR:
“Vincere, which comes as close to grand opera as can be achieved without anyone actually bursting into song, feels like a big movie — handsomely mounted, full of dark shadows counterpointed with stray shafts of light, with dramatic close-ups of faces driven by passion and madness and heavy silences brutally interrupted by clashing tympani.

Yet the movie’s scale is small and resolutely personal, filtering politics discreetly through character and individual destiny. Played with quiet ferocity by the stunning green-eyed actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who lost out to the better-known Penelope Cruz for Best Actress at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Ida is one of those women who, given the space to nurture her talents, might have become a rock star in her own right, yet chose instead to attach herself to a man she saw as more powerful than herself.”

Rob Nelson of the Village Voice:
“Vincere…is the veteran director’s stylistic knockout, a movie whose audacious editing fully captures the hot and heavy relationships between past and present, sex and politics, reality and, yes, cinema….Giovanna Mezzogiorno…[is] A fiercely committed actor, at least the equal of Antichrist’s Charlotte Gainsbourg (who snatched last year’s Cannes prize out from under her), Mezzogiorno does a full-on Maria Falconetti number here, quivering half-stoically in close-ups as her character is condemned by an all-male jury. Climbing the bars of the asylum as snow falls (a gorgeous image in a film that’s full of them)…

Its title translating as “Win,” Vincere is a victory for the doomed Dalser only in the sense that she’s finally gotten a camera’s attention, but, of course, that’s a lot. “You’re my woman,” Il Duce tells his secret lover early on in the movie. “So be quiet.” Her refusal to do so is Bellocchio’s cause for celebration—and his audience’s good fortune.”

David Edelstein in New York Magazine: “The movie, a near-masterpiece, is a monument to intoxication: of sexual conquest, of military conquest, and, most of all, of cinema.”