The Great Beauty (2013)

Sorrentino delivers a heady, beautiful and entrancing vision of Rome as both stage and character, following a cultured writer's late-life reckoning with lost love and unfulfilled promise. The critic singles out the film's soulful depth beneath its surface glamour and virtuoso style.

The critic experiences pure euphoria from the film, calling it an audacious experiment in pleasure that is both refined and vulgar. They single out the overwhelming visual intensity, sensory power, and Sorrentino’s ability to capture Rome’s sublime emptiness through elaborate staging and chance-like discoveries.

Sorrentino’s film is drop-dead gorgeous and luxuriously cinematic, with masterful visuals and music, but it also explores deeper ideas about life and regret through the journey of its suave protagonist. Turan singles out Toni Servillo’s exquisite, understated performance and the way the film makes Rome look more beautiful than ever.

The critic hails the film as a swooning love letter to Roman decadence and Sorrentino's best yet, a pure sensual overload of richness, strangeness and sadness in the tradition of Antonioni and Fellini.

The film is a deliriously alive portrait of a sybaritic Roman journalist adrift in the Eternal City, following his existential awakening after news of a lost love. Dargis praises Sorrentino’s associative, episodic style and Servillo’s soulful performance as it captures a man, a city, and Italian cinema itself.

The densely packed film is an astonishing cinematic feast and modern take on La dolce vita that honors Rome in all its splendor and superficiality while following a stalled author’s awakening. Weissberg praises its visual splendor, Servillo’s world-weary performance, and how it dissects empty high-society diversions with broad strokes and minute detail.

The critic highlights the film's ravishing, sensuous imagery and its daring structure as a high-wire act centered on one character's unspecified yearning, comparing it favorably to Fellini while noting its generosity toward characters. It is called potentially the most unforgettable film of the year.

The review highlights Sorrentino's richly visualised, vignette-based meditation on 21st-century excess in Rome, seen through a jaded journalist's eyes, comparing it to Fellini while noting its damning yet celebratory tone and self-indulgence as the point.

The review notes shades of Fellini in Sorrentino's spirited drama about a jaded Roman flâneur awakening to the city's splendour amid high-society decadence. It praises the film's visual and emotional impact while acknowledging its familiar territory.

The critic praises Sorrentino's fluid, satirical portrait of Rome and its high society through the eyes of a jaded journalist, noting the gorgeous Caravaggio-toned visuals and de luxe filmmaking. It falls short of masterpiece status due to insufficient narrative drive but remains hugely enjoyable.

Sorrentino returns to Italy with a visually extravagant, Fellini-inspired portrait of Roman high society seen through a world-weary journalist's eyes. The critic highlights the film's technical virtuosity and its meditation on superficiality, lost youth and spiritual emptiness.

The critic praises Sorrentino's reverent update on Fellini's vision of Rome's moral chaos and decadence, noting the film's humor, creative excess, and strong performances, particularly by Toni Servillo. An overly indulgent running time undercuts some of the fun, but it should appeal to international audiences.

The critic finds the film beautiful in its depiction of Rome but doubts it qualifies as great, criticizing the shallow characters and soporific pacing of its critiques of art, politics and media while noting the city looks inviting.

Sorrentino's virtuoso fresco of contemporary Rome mixes elegy and world-weariness, with Toni Servillo's jaded journalist drifting through decadent parties and missed opportunities. The review praises the ravishing camerawork and seductive score but notes it recycles Fellini-esque visions without adding much substance.

The critic finds the first half an inviting, beautifully mounted fantasy of Rome's sex and decay in the Fellini tradition, but faults the film for succumbing to self-delusions of moral and political grandeur in its later sections, turning self-pitying and losing satirical edge.

The film is an astonishing, visceral piece of filmmaking that feels intimate and emotional despite its grand scale. Sorrentino explores love, death, nostalgia and religion through Jep's search, with strong praise for Servillo's performance, the score and the portrayal of Roman life.

Sorrentino uncovers the moral chaos of Rome's elite in a film that picks up threads from La Dolce Vita, with magnetic work from Servillo and effective satire. The overlong 135 minutes still offers enough pleasurable and engaging moments.

The critic is awed by the film’s luxuriant detail and technical bravado from the opening sequence onward. They single out the picaresque narrative exploring Rome’s contrasts through Jep’s life of elation and ennui, resulting in a dazzling cumulative effect.

Sorrentino delivers an indulgent but heady, dreamlike Fellini-esque reflection on life, love, philosophy and regret through impressions rather than plot. It celebrates what has been while noting the film's overlong party sequences and broad characterizations.

Sorrentino distills the cultural inheritance of Fellini and Berlusconi into a portrait of Rome's elite, retaining the city's sumptuousness while showing ambivalence toward its spectacle. The film is marked by impermanence and ends with a powerful redemption as the protagonist recognizes something real amid superficiality.