The story of an aging writer who bitterly recollects his passionate, lost youth. A portrait of today's Rome.
Long, chaotic, yet with style to burn, the mood is lavishly melancholic.
Sumptuous and self-indulgent, Sorrentino's latest is a Fellini-like feast for the eyes.
Beautiful and timely.
Shot in gorgeous Caravaggio tones by Luca Bigazzi, The Great Beauty is de luxe filmmaking.
Sorrentino has created a remarkable vision of modern-day Rome here; it’s a place rife with conspicuous consumption, spiritual corruption and bankrupt creativity, but also lush and vibrant and easily satirized.
A simply breathtaking work of art with a very human, intensely cinematic heart.
The Great Beauty is way too long and positively infatuated with excess in its ravishing visuals and hysterical emotional drive and yet it lingers in the imagination long after more disciplined, well-behaved films have faded.
Ultimately, it all adds up to less than the sum of its parts, lacking the discipline of the superior Il Divo. But Servillo is an entrancingly mercurial presence upon whose reptilian smile an entire city appears to be founded.
General release. Check local listings for show times.
RSS feed of Cinema reviews