Caterina in the Big City

About half of Paolo Virzi's middlebrow dramedy is a reasonably charming look at the transition the young title character endures after her family moves from a provincial town to Rome. Twelve-year-old Caterina (Teghil) is alternately befriended by two cliques in her new class: grungy intellectuals and pampered socialites. Meanwhile, her aspiring-novelist dad (Castellitto) has a very public nervous breakdown, in far less successful segments that are supposed to pass for a satire of nepotism and favoritism in Italian society. At least a cameo by Roberto Benigni is mercifully brief.