“In ‘Martin Eden,’ the games that Marcello plays with form and structure coalesce into an immensely moving film, which — grounded by the standout turn from Marinelli — offers a new direction for the stale “Great American Novel” adaptation.”

| Feb 10, 2024

... The film surpasses the story it tells to capably broach social and philosophical confines without ever overstating them. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 18, 2023

As a kind of postmodern spin on a Visconti-type melodrama, the film is something to see. The storyline itself, though, is a bit tiresome in its old-fashionedness.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 6, 2022

I enjoy Martin Eden (and its soundtrack!) very much on a style level...

| Nov 28, 2022

[A] ravishing adaptation of Jack London's 1909 Künstlerroman.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Nov 4, 2021

It's spiky and tactile in its visual sensibility, and director Pietro Marcello shifts things around from the original text while still tackling London's exploration of individualism and class structure.

| Sep 10, 2021

The film is interesting for fans of the novel, for fans of inventive cinema and anyone who likes an existential/philosophical conundrum. However it is a niche market.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 20, 2021

Never have I seen a film that makes such a drama from the writer's creative frenzy, the obsessive-compulsive need to reach an audience.

| Aug 1, 2021

A vibrant, award-winning lead performance from Luca Marinelli dominates this drama about education, class status and the spirit of socialism.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 15, 2021

The film traces Martin's love affair with the pursuit of individual advancement. Like capitalism, it's seductive.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 12, 2021

It's Martin against the world and his struggles and tiny triumphs are glorious to see.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 9, 2021

With his radiant imagery, masterful casting and bold alterations to the source material, writer/director Pietro Marcello makes certain that no one will confuse this new London adaption for the last.

| Jul 9, 2021

In Italian star Luca Marinelli, he's cast a true-blue matinee idol as the tortured hero: in an extraordinary performance that matches brute physicality to soulful interior yearning, he carries the film on square shoulders.

| Jul 9, 2021

So much narrative ambition can be enervating, but Marinelli's performance is mesmerizing. It helps that he is broodingly beautiful, somewhere between Brando and Belmondo

| Jun 24, 2021

Despite the liberties it takes with the source material, the film is dramatically and emotionally immensely satisfying.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 18, 2021

Disenchantment is the dark side of success in director Pietro Marcello's sweeping measure of a driven man's reinvention.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 16, 2021

As the film closes we are left with a poetic elegy for a simpler past, albeit one that might only exist as the fantasy of a man driven insane by the world.

| Jun 5, 2021

Martin Eden is a subtle and complex character study of one man's ideological tempest.

| Jun 5, 2021

A wonderfully overripe, sensual, stylistically excessive movie of the sort that "Italian art cinema" has conjured up ever since it was first possible to formulate that phrase.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 30, 2021

I feel this film lacks needed cohesiveness and continuity, but because I did like the story and the acting, I'll give it a pass.

| Original Score: C+ | Feb 10, 2021