
Flicks, Matt Glasby
Writer/director Paolo Sorrentino makes big, brassy films about all things Italian – not for everyone, or every mood – but his latest effort won this year's Best Foreign Language Oscar, so he's doing something right.
Full reviewA portrait of Rome, this Italian drama from Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo) tells the story of an aging writer in the midst of an existential crisis. Winner of Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards and Golden Globes 2014 and nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2013. Says the Guardian: "It is in the classic high Italian style of Fellini's La Dolce Vita... The grande bellezza [the film's title in Italian] can mean love, or sex, or art, or death, but most of all it here means Rome, and the movie wants to drown itself in Rome's fathomless depths of history and worldliness."
Aristocratic ladies, social climbers, politicians, high-flying criminals, journalists, actors, decadent nobles, prelates, artists and intellectuals - whether authentic or presumed - form a network of flaky relationships, all engulfed in a desperate Babylon which plays out in the antique palaces, villas and terraces in Rome. Jep Gambardella, 65 - indolent, disenchanted, his eyes permanently imbued with gin and tonic - watches this parade of humanity.
LessWriter/director Paolo Sorrentino makes big, brassy films about all things Italian – not for everyone, or every mood – but his latest effort won this year's Best Foreign Language Oscar, so he's doing something right.
Full reviewRome in all its splendor and superficiality, artifice and significance, becomes an enormous banquet too rich to digest in one sitting.
Full reviewLook no further... if you wish to know whether, where, and in what guise the spirit of Fellini remains at work-and, better still, at play.
Full reviewA deliriously alive movie... the story of a man, a city, a country and a cinema, though not necessarily in that order.
Full reviewAs always, Sorrentino has an architectural eye, his cameras panning over crumbling buildings, unclothed bodies and (most importantly) Servillo's face with enraptured awe.
Full reviewReferencing without imitating Fellini, Sorrentino offers an amusing update on Italian society at the end of a cycle.
Full reviewSumptuous and self-indulgent, Sorrentino's latest is a Fellini-like feast for the eyes.
Full reviewThe Great Beauty is available to stream in New Zealand now on Google Play and Apple TV and Academy On Demand.
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