These picaresque and picturesque adventures fail to coalesce into a movie. But it’s impossible to argue with Daria D’Antonio’s ravishing cinematography and an unexpectedly moving coda featuring Stefania Sandrelli as an older Parthenope.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 30, 2025

Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino’s latest cinema exuberance, flutters like its recurring motif of a silk scarf caught in a Mediterranean breeze -- tantalizing, yet just out of reach.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 21, 2025

A two-dimensional examination of gender, tethered to a protagonist with no real depth.

| Feb 18, 2025

The longer the movie goes on, the older Parthenope gets. The older she gets, the weirder the story gets. And the weirder the story gets, the more I liked it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 18, 2025

It’s just another of Sorrentino’s many impressionistic vignettes about Naples that don’t add up to much.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Feb 14, 2025

You're in for a never-boring transcendent cinematic experience that sizzles way hotter than "Challengers" and is as fascinating as it is endlessly frustrating and rigorously audacious.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 12, 2025

What the movie's about is this: beauty is wonderful, but it wreaks havoc.

| Feb 11, 2025

Without a character that we feel connected to, even Parthenope’s great beauty, meant to suggest Naples itself, qualifies as an overburdened resource.

| Feb 10, 2025

By the end, you can’t help but see Sorrentino as an earnest poet, but also one whose pretty-sounding, lushly filmed musings are for the sake of hearing his own voice rather than for creating coherent, earned meaning.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 8, 2025

Della Porta certainly works overtime to show you that Parthenope is indeed more than just a pretty face. Yet her efforts keep getting undermined by Sorrentino’s own inability to get beyond the beauty himself.

| Feb 8, 2025

Parthenope can’t overcome the very prosaic problem of a main character who isn’t really much of a character at all.

| Original Score: C+ | Feb 7, 2025

As sumptuous and vapid as a commercial for Dior or Chanel’s latest fragrance.

| Feb 7, 2025

That’s ultimately what Parthenope is: a spectacle. Sorrentino frames stunning scenes, almost like a series of editorial fashion shoots, but the story becomes lost in the aesthetics.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 7, 2025

A modern myth of beauty incarnate—striking, seductive, and forever out of reach.

| Feb 7, 2025

At least the hypnotizing Dalla Porta brings a strength and sadness to the role that underscores the film's most compelling argument.

| Feb 6, 2025

The film’s succession of symbolically loaded vignettes is less meaningful than intended.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 2, 2025

If its main message is that beauty is only skin deep, then what we see is a bit like watching a languorous, glamorous lifestyle commercial on the big screen to make that rather obvious point.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 3, 2025

Mostly the film is an experience you can drift through as the heroine drifts through life, enchanted and sceptical at once. Something to occupy the time, even if you’re less than fully sold.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 23, 2024

“Parthenope” is a work of casual mastery; you could say that it’s great and it’s beautiful.

| Aug 8, 2024

An exquisite treatise on cinematic beauty

| Jun 1, 2024