Sorrentino's heady, vivid yet wearily melancholic musing on midlife crisis submerges you in sumptuousness until you emerge, blinking, as if from some impossibly glamorous party.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 5, 2017

Wild set-pieces and rueful observations are the stock in trade of this Italian film by one of the modern masters of cinema, Paolo Sorrentino.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 13, 2014

I can't remember when a film last gave me such a surge of pure pleasure -- no, outright euphoria -- as The Great Beauty.

| Feb 6, 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.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 31, 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.

| Jan 30, 2014

A riotous film that finds depth, clarity and refreshment in even the shallowest of pools.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 30, 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.

| Original Score: A | Jan 16, 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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 2, 2014

Go ahead. Soak up the Beauty. It's one of the best films of the year.

| Original Score: A | Dec 12, 2013

Sometimes all you want from a movie is more. Sorrentino's opulent carnival of modern Rome is the most more you could ever hope to see.

| Dec 10, 2013

Paolo Sorrentino's overwrought, Felliniesque opus ...

| Nov 29, 2013

At times it seems that every frame is a tribute to the Fellini classics of the early 1960s.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 28, 2013

"The Great Beauty" is drop-dead gorgeous, a film that is luxuriously, seductively, stunningly cinematic.

| Nov 26, 2013

If the antics of the beau monde disgust or exhaust you, stay away from Sorrentino's film; look no further, on the other hand, if you wish to know whether, where, and in what guise the spirit of Fellini remains at work-and, better still, at play.

| Nov 25, 2013

This is a Fellini project, if you like, but it is a film full of music, dance, Rome's crème brûlée light and a sensual tenderness, so that it might have been made by Renoir.

| Nov 25, 2013

The melancholy in this film is just as trumped up as the frenzy.

| Original Score: C- | Nov 22, 2013

The Great Beauty is a subtly daring cinematic high-wire act - an entire film built around one character's unrealized, unspecified yearning. And it might just be the most unforgettable film of the year.

| Nov 22, 2013

Sorrentino's juxtaposition of contemporary Roman indulgence and the Eternal City's place in history's imagination makes for a bittersweet epic in which a solitary character, Jep, stands in for the director, and us, and experiences an epiphany.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 21, 2013

Never have cynicism and disillusion seemed more intoxicating than in "The Great Beauty," which is such an overwhelming visual and auditory experience that its elements of cautionary moral fable threaten to get lost amid the gorgeousness.

| Nov 15, 2013

There's an exhilarating sadness to it all that amounts to cinematic poetry.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 15, 2013