A Patient Drama With Frayed Edges

Read Time:5 Minute, 29 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
For the Love of a Woman (Per amore di una donna)
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Genre: Romantic Drama / Historical Drama
Year Released: 2025, 2026
Runtime: 1h 57m
Director: Guido Chiesa
Writers: Nicoletta Micheli, Guido Chiesa
Cast: Mili Avital, Ana Ularu, Ori Pfeffer, Alban Ukaj, Marc Rissmann, Serhii Kysil, Anastasia Doaga, Sira Topic, Limor Goldstein, Vincenzo Nemolato, Menashe Noy, Moni Moshonov
Where to Watch: in select theaters starting June 26, 2026; New York at Quad Cinema beginning June 26, Los Angeles at Laemmle Royal and Encino at Laemmle Town Center beginning July 10

RAVING REVIEW: FOR THE LOVE OF A WOMAN understands that family history rarely comes with a perfect explanation. It comes through fragments, omissions, letters left too late, and people who spent decades surviving choices they never learned how to name. Guido Chiesa’s adaptation of Meir Shalev’s THE LOVES OF JUDITH reaches for that uneasy space between mystery and inheritance, following Esther Horwitz, an American woman in the 1970s whose mother’s death sends her toward Israel and toward a buried story from British Mandate Palestine. The movie has the shape of a romantic historical saga, but its better instincts are quieter than that. A daughter trying to understand why love, shame, and silence have been passed down to her like family property.

Mili Avital plays Esther as a woman who seems both restless and emotionally stalled. She isn’t shown as someone chasing adventure. She’s looking for an answer because the alternative is to continue living with a blank space where her own story should be. That gives the 1970s portion an ache, especially once Esther meets Zayde Rabinovich, played by Ori Pfeffer, a professor whose knowledge of the past comes with private wounds of his own. Their scenes often work less as romance than as a partnership between two people who recognize sadness in each other before they know what to do with it.

The earlier timeline belongs to Yehudit Salomon, played by Ana Ularu, whose arrival in a 1930s settlers’ village unsettles three men. Moshe, a widowed father; Yaakov, an idealist with his head half in the clouds; and Globerman, a cattle trader whose pragmatism carries its own kind of threat. Chiesa and co-writer Nicoletta Micheli build the film by moving between Esther’s investigation and Yehudit’s life, letting the past and present gradually press against each other. That structure gives FOR THE LOVE OF A WOMAN a hook, and the mystery of Esther’s origins keeps the story moving even when the film’s emotional pulse slows.

Ularu gives the film a compelling presence. Yehudit could have been reduced to an object of fascination, the mysterious woman who inspires desire, rivalry, projection, and damage. Ularu pushes against that by giving her a life that doesn’t always show itself through dialogue. Her face carries calculation, disappointment, fury, and exhaustion in small shifts, and the film needs that because the men around Yehudit often see her more as an idea than as a person. Alban Ukaj, Marc Rissmann, and Serhii Kysil each bring distinctiveness to these portrayals, though the writing sometimes reduces them to simple versions before they become complex.

Chiesa’s film is at its best when it lets contradiction remain in the room. FOR THE LOVE OF A WOMAN is dealing with motherhood, exile, violence, desire, chosen family, and the painful need to know where you came from. It also places its story in a historical setting that can’t help but carry political implications, even when the film insists on approaching that world through personal drama rather than direct political argument. That choice is understandable, and the story need not become a lecture.

Avital and Pfeffer help keep the 1970s timeline grounded through their restraint. Esther and Zayde could have slipped into melodramatic convenience, two wounded people bonded by a shared investigation and a few too many buried secrets. Their connection is more interesting when it stays speculative. Pfeffer gives Zayde a guarded warmth that works well against Avital’s brittle uncertainty, and their scenes carry the sense of adults who have learned to function without mistaking that for healing. The film’s quieter exchanges between them are often more persuasive than its larger romantic or tragic gestures.

The production has a period-drama quality that will appeal to audiences drawn to literary adaptations and multigenerational family stories. Emanuele Pasquet’s cinematography gives the earlier material an inviting feel, while Zoë Keating’s music supports the film’s mournful, searching tone without overwhelming every scene.

FOR THE LOVE OF A WOMAN is an emotionally earnest drama with strong source material, a thoughtful adaptation, and a cast capable of suggesting more than the script always gives them. As it stands, Chiesa’s film is valuable but uneven. It has an effective performance, a solid mystery framework, and enough literary richness to carry viewers through its slower patches. It occasionally overexplains, softens some of its more difficult implications, and occasionally reaches for grandeur when a more intimate wound would have cut deeper. FOR THE LOVE OF A WOMAN works best as a story about inheritance, not just the secrets families keep, but the emotional habits they leave behind. That version of the film is strong enough to make the journey meaningful, even when the destination feels more composed than devastating.

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[photo courtesy of PANORAMA FILMS, VIVO FILM]

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