The skill of Cinema Paradiso happily manages to suggest that such a legacy has not entirely evaporated. At any rate, I find the experience it offers an enchanting one.

| Jul 26, 2022

Cinema Paradiso itself possesses enough command and self-conviction to demonstrate that movies can still manage to manifest an alternative universe.

| Jan 11, 2020

Giuseppe Tornatore, writer and director of Cinema Paradiso, knows that the way to make shameless wallowing palatable is to make no great claims for what you are resurrecting.

| Dec 6, 2018

A cinema-lover's delight.

| Sep 6, 2017

Recent changes to cinema which have seen the projectionist's art sidelined in the digital age add a further layer of poignancy to the magical memories.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 16, 2013

Cinema Paradiso is much loved, though I have occasionally been the man in the Bateman cartoon: the reviewer who confessed to finding Cinema Paradiso a bit sugary and the kid really annoying.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 12, 2013

Tornatore may have hit a sticky wicket with his subsequent work, but he knew what he was doing here: warning us about the irrational lure of the filmed past, which is to say cinema itself, then ushering us grandly to our seats.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 12, 2013

Its confidence is staggering. And its commitment to a classic narrative that is also essentially a parable story, markedly unusual. They really don't make them like that any more.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 12, 2013

A bald-faced act of unalloyed, weapons grade sentimentalism in which humanity is drained of anything with even a passing resemblance to a soul.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 12, 2013

Utterly irresistible, this may be a cornball celebration of the art and social history of cinema, but it's also a thoughtful memoir of more innocent days, when pleasures rarely came cheaply or instantly.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 9, 2013

Returning to cinemas in spiffily remastered form ... the film retains its wide-eyed charm, pitched halfway between unrestrained romanticism and unknowing kitsch.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 9, 2013

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 7, 2003

The heightened symmetry of this new/old Cinema Paradiso makes the film a fuller experience, like an old friend haunted by the exigencies of time.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 19, 2002

In the director's cut, the film is not only a love song to the movies but it also is more fully an example of the kind of lush, all-enveloping movie experience it rhapsodizes.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 19, 2002

The film's final hour, where nearly all the previous unseen material resides, is unconvincing soap opera that Tornatore was right to cut.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 19, 2002

Still rapturous after all these years, Cinema Paradiso stands as one of the great films about movie love.

Full Review | Jul 11, 2002

This director's cut -- which adds 51 minutes -- takes a great film and turns it into a mundane soap opera.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 28, 2002

Where the original release was an essay in childish delight and adolescent longing, topped off by a muted coda implying that you really can go home again, the reissue is a fully realized epic of the heart.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 28, 2002

I'm happy to have seen it -- not as an alternate version, but as the ultimate exercise in viewing deleted scenes.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 28, 2002

Less front-loaded and more shapely than the two-hour version released here in 1990.

Full Review | Jun 27, 2002