The Great Beauty

A lot of ideas, a whole bunch of opinions and a brutal deal of philosophizing. And on top of that you get a visual side that will make many an eye melt away. I accept all that, but at the same time it wasn’t an easy movie for me to handle the first time. I will definitely watch it again… someday. But now please give me a moment to fully realize what it was that I actually saw. The Great Beauty is a crazy critique of a society. A critique of fleetingness, arrogance, vanity… and some of the scenes were so crazy I don’t think I will ever get them out of my head. (01/04/2014)

A writer's block, a magical city, beautiful women and a (dis)appetite for a wild social life, or the Fellini of modern times. It's not easy to immediately collect all your thoughts and fully embrace the elaborate metaphorical play in which Sorrentino has wrapped a story about the present-day fate of old age and loneliness, but it's all too easy to like this play and be swept away by it. The charming production design itself, packed with beautiful images, flawlessly composed music and civil dialogues, is a delight to watch, not to mention the perfect actors and the precisely dosed insight that has always belonged to life, and therefore to this film. And it's uncanny how similar the emotions of the film sound compared to the famous 8 1/2, fifty years earlier. People don’t change and Italian filmmakers are proof of that. :) 80% (01/06/2014)

Crisis as a pose, beauty as the only principle of construction. Sometimes it works wonderfully (the introduction and the conclusion), whilst other times it's empty, ostentatious, unnecessarily eloquent and awkwardly theatrical. Even the biting irony is only about halfway there. Sorrentino is an excellent director, but unlike Fellini's "Roman frescoes", which are internally experienced and in every chord accurate, he realizes the idea of a nostalgic protagonist in crisis much less convincingly, but all the more heinously and loudly. A film that plays at being a classic just like the protagonist plays at being a blessed man of the world. Sorrentino had already made films that are an order of magnitude better, but also less affectionate. (07/02/2013)

Fellini for the new millennium, or an ode to Rome and the life of the campaign city’s upper crust packaged in a portrait of an old dandy looking back on his own life while raising question about the essence of artistic creation, creative distinction and faith. With its style straddling the line between parable, dreams and magical realism, The Great Beauty inevitably evokes the Fellini classics La Dolce Vita, 8½ and Roma, but it does not in any way copy or plagiarise them. It just addresses the same themes in the same spirit, though with respect to the age and misanthropic nature of the main character, it focuses on different elements and values. (06/26/2013)

A very interesting film that slightly pretends to be a contemplation on old age, slightly as a glimpse into the realm of the wealthy and their lives, which move at a frantic pace and it doesn't matter how old you are, but it's actually an existential drama about the place of a person in the world. And it doesn't matter who you are, because if you don't realize what you actually want, what you're doing, where you're heading, your life will stop making sense. You won't have a goal. Nevertheless, it is possible to live like this. The film may be a bit too long and in some passages draggy, but especially the first half offers truly unique, original, and definitely unexpected scenes. The scene on the balcony is then almost surreally magical. (12/31/2013)