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"  Luca Guadagnino&amp;#039;s glamorous, dramatic I Am Love, set in Milan and starring a magnificent Tilda Swinton, opens here this month after electrifying audiences on the festival circuit since last fall. The title may suggest a romantic comedy or a sentimental weeper, but by the end, like the movie itself, it touches a chord so deep and elemental that it could be the imperative of some ancient god, ruthlessly announcing his power. It&amp;#039;s as if there were the invisible subtitle: &amp;quot;I Am Love\u2014Refuse Me at Your Peril.&amp;quot; In the Italian writer-director Guadagnino&amp;#039;s story, that scary, thrilling challenge confronts Swinton&amp;#039;s elegant trophy wife, Emma Recchi, whose husband, Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), and their adult sons\u2014one hard like his father, the other an idealistic golden boy\u2014are the heirs to a great textile manufacturing fortune. The Recchis aren&amp;#039;t simply a family but an haute-bourgeois dynasty in the making, proud of their social status and even prouder of the exquisite propriety and perfection of the life they&amp;#039;ve created for themselves. The unruly attraction to another man that begins to engulf Emma threatens that perfect pattern, giving the movie its narrative tension. But just as she&amp;#039;s transfixed in spite of herself, so are we. Intense romantic passion, particularly the extramarital variety, is a dubious entity in movies these days, often portrayed as a destructive, even lethal force\u2014that is, when it&amp;#039;s not an object of irony and sardonic derision. What makes I Am Love feel both timeless and startlingly transgressive is its bold assertion of sexual love as a potential liberation of the spirit, exalted and exalting, the unique yet universal gift of the human psyche.  Powered by John Adams&amp;#039; urgent, propulsive score, which reaches a spectacular climax in the movie&amp;#039;s most important scene, I Am Love pits the airs and graces of civilization against the raw urgencies of nature. And while Guadagnino lets us glimpse the behind-the-scenes brutalities of wealth and power, he doesn&amp;#039;t stack the deck. From the cool, gray opening montage of a snowdusted Milan to the tasteful World of Interiors magazine sophistication of the Recchis&amp;#039; palazzo, the family&amp;#039;s setting is as gorgeous in its own way as the brimmingly fertile countryside where Emma visits her lover. It&amp;#039;s luxe versus lush, and they&amp;#039;re equally seductive. In perhaps the director&amp;#039;s most inspired stroke, while Emma is the pivot of this story, through much of the movie she&amp;#039;s an enigma. We know that when Tancredi met her years ago in Russia on a trip to buy art, she was the most prized object of beauty he brought home. Impeccably turned out and speaking fluent Italian with a slight Russian accent, Emma has fit herself into the Recchis&amp;#039; world so perfectly that she doesn&amp;#039;t seem quite real. The largely Italian cast of I Am Love is first-rate, but leave it to Swinton to give an expertly calibrated performance within a performance, while at the same time exposing the one quality of Emma&amp;#039;s that&amp;#039;s never in doubt: her capacity for love. The bond between Emma and her housekeeper is a grace note that yields a powerful dividend at the movie&amp;#039;s denouement. She&amp;#039;s the tender heart of this ambitious, competitive family, its warm, forgiving center; she loves her children so unreservedly that her artist daughter, Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher), feels safe enough to confide in her mother about her own transgressive, secret passion.  The movie is a major breakout for Guadagnino, whose previous features\u2014including an experimental 1999 hybrid of fiction and documentary featuring Swinton\u2014went nowhere. I Am Love is also a collaboration between its star and director, who are both producers on the film. They&amp;#039;re also longtime friends, who first met in Rome 17 years ago when Guadagnino persuaded Swinton to appear in a student film he was making, which apparently was never completed. No matter, because with I Am Love, they&amp;#039;ve painted themselves a masterpiece. Given Swinton&amp;#039;s severe Renaissance beauty and red-gold hair, call it the cinematic equivalent of a Titian. Click here to see more film picks from Karen Durbin          Fancy ThisAm\u00E9lie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet lowers the cuteness quotient in his antic antiwar comedy Micmacs, and it&amp;#039;s all good. Casting S\u00E9raphine&amp;#039;s great Yolande Moreau as the den mother of his titular underground boho subversives, he and they ingeniously pit two filthy-rich arms dealers against each other in hope of achieving that Cold War staple, mutually assured destruction. Photo: Courtesy of Epithete Films - Tapioca Films/courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics             Funny Girl In their funny, fascinating doc Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, directors Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg manage to inspire affection and respect for the stand-up pioneer whose act includes calling her daughter the c word. For a woman who&amp;#039;s chugging through her seventies making people laugh a lot and cry a little, the only word is valiant. Photo: Courtesy of Seth Keal/courtesy of IFC Films             Family Values  Not yet 30, award-winning writer-director Mia Hansen-L\u00F8ve both comments on and stakes her place in the world of first-rate independent French cinema with The Father of My Children. Her touching, incisive portrait of a happy family struck by tragedy hits us almost as hard as it does her characters, but the unexpected thrill comes in watching how they get up and move on. Photo: Courtesy of Karine Arlot/courtesy of IFC Films  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/reviews/a11152/reel-picks-june-movies-444262/>