REVIEWED - GOOD MORNING, NIGHT (BUONGIORNO, NOTTE): The distinguished Italian writer-director Marco Bellochio, whose work has spanned over 40 years, has produced one of the outstanding films of his career in the richly accomplished Good Morning, Night, writes Michael Dwyer.

This brooding, unsettling political drama is a fascinating companion piece to The Best of Youth in its amplification of one of that epic's major themes, the wave of terrorism that shook Italy in the 1970s, and specifically, the convulsive event that constituted the kidnapping of the former prime minister, Aldo Moro, in 1978.

The film is built around a handful of principal characters: Moro himself and the four idealistic Red Brigade terrorists holding him captive in exchange for the release of fellow terrorists jailed in Turin. Moro's party, the Christian Democrats, and the Vatican refuse to negotiate with his abductors, and as the stalemate continues, the captors themselves become prisoners, forced by their actions to exist in an edgy state of permanent vigilance.

Taking its title from an Emily Dickinson poem, this thoughtful, precisely measured chamber piece builds in understated power and cinematic mastery, and it features fine, intense performances from Maya Sansa as the only woman among the terrorists, Luigi Lo Casto (who plays one of the two brothers at the heart of The Best of Youth) as their rigidly ideological leader, and Roberto Herlitzka in a dignified, moving portrayal of Moro.