The Great Beauty
Jep Gambardella, who once wrote a famous novel in his twenties, only to retire into a comfortable life writing cultural columns and throwing parties in Rome. After his 65th birthday party, he walks through the ruins and city streets, encountering the various characters, bitterly recollecting his passionate youth.
22 June 1973, Bergamo, Lombardy, Italy
31 July 1961, Rome, Lazio, Italy
May 13, 1931 in Verona, Veneto, Italy
31 March 1964, Ponte dell'Olio, Emilia-Romagna, Italy
1936, Rome, Lazio, Italy
17 November 1950, Rome, Lazio, Italy
1 January 1957, Prato, Tuscany, Italy
14 August 1934, Nîmes, Gard, France
4 July 1961, Genoa, Liguria, Italy
16 September 1945, Isola Dovarese, Cremona, Italy
6 January 1943, Udine, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy
1 January 1967, Rome, Lazio, Italy
1 October 1965, Naples, Italy
21 October 1935, Pisa, Tuscany, Italy
31 May 1970, Naples, Campania, Italy
27 August 1962, Rome, Lazio, Italy
May 2, 1943 in Rome, Lazio, Italy
May 13, 2014
Exceptional, mature film dazzles, offers haunting insights.January 30, 2014
Celebrating Rome in all its decay, this florid comedy by Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo, This Must Be the Place) opens with a hyperbolically gaudy party honoring a celebrity journalist on his 65th birthday.January 02, 2014
It's a beauty, all right. It's more a style show than a deep philosophical treatise, but with surfaces this sleek and faces this interesting, I'll take style over substance any day.April 04, 2014
"The Great Beauty" is a great romance: a man and a city and a love that cannot be consummated but which will consume you surely. Somewhere, Baz Luhrmann weeps.May 12, 2015
A richly symbolic meditation on aging, mortality and precious time wasted.January 31, 2014
The Great Beauty is an utterly ravishing portrait of listless luxuriance, a fantasy of decadent wealth and beauty that evokes Fellini's La Dolce Vita by way of Baz Luhrmann.January 30, 2014
A riotous film that finds depth, clarity and refreshment in even the shallowest of pools.October 01, 2014
Sometimes too overblown, surreal and obtuse for its own good, director Paolo Sorrentino's film is nonetheless an exquisitely composed portrait of vapidity and decline.March 10, 2014
'The Great Beauty' is certainly striking, but too often what it's striking are poses.January 08, 2014
Though there's precious little drama, Sorrentino's skills as an image-maker are indisputable.March 27, 2014
If it sounds a bit ponderous, well, maybe it is, but it's also smart, warm-hearted and sumptuously shot.January 16, 2014
Throughout the film, Sorrentino delivers gorgeous images, crazy images, startling and sexy and serene images; it's a visual bath of sorts - the great beauty is everywhere, Jep (and we) just have to be open to it.