SummaryJep Gambardella has seduced his way through the lavish nightlife of Rome for decades, but after his 65th birthday and a shock from the past, Jep looks past the nightclubs and parties to find a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty.
SummaryJep Gambardella has seduced his way through the lavish nightlife of Rome for decades, but after his 65th birthday and a shock from the past, Jep looks past the nightclubs and parties to find a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty.
Drunk on the visual majesty of Rome, just as Fellini once was, this is arthouse cinema at its most effortlessly entrancing, with life and art blending into one magnificent whole.
This movie looks and feels superb, it is pure couture cinema. But there is also a excess of richness and bombast and for all its sleekness I felt that the spark of emotion was being hidden, and there is a kind of frustration in the operatic sadness.
I feel like this movie has a similar origin story to The Fall, except that instead of trying to do and be a lot of different things, The Great Beauty just is and somehow breezes by everything else that came before it with nouveau cool. This is not for people that have seen The Expendables on purpose. It’s art, and while the characters are often pretentious it is not so itself. It touches upon everything by being true in everything it touches. There is poise, and brilliance, and perfection in the performances, the script, the direction, and the exquisite cinematography. The only complaint I can possibly think of is that it has the ambiance of that old world sexism in it, the kind that is unintentional but also unapologetic. There’s nothing overt, but the protagonist Jep smacks of those older white male intellectuals that get to go around feeling like they get something that no one else can. He is not that, because no one in the film feels like a trope, but throughout young women appear as poseurs disproportionately to their male counterparts. I don’t know if that’s true of Italy, but where everything else in the film feels like it resonates on a universal level, this feels temporal, and it drags the achievement down a little from where it might have otherwise been.
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.
A lovely but rambling excursion through moneyed Rome, the film can’t have remotely the same impact as its predecessor, but it does offer a cornucopia of dazzling images—so many, frankly, that it becomes a bit exhausting, especially at nearly two and a half hours.
the best film ive ever seen its the type of film that stick in your mind maybe forever ;every shot IS STUNNING/music is from another world/ and what let this film be a masterpiece or a work of art is how affected your soul and your mind with all this beauty and philosiphical topics all that and more from the acting to the cinematography 10/10 i feel empty after finished this piece of art that weirdly entertaining maybe the best experience ive ever had
This film has almost no purpose. There's no clear meaning at the end of the day and it doesn't talk about anything. I think that was the idea of Sorrentino because he also says something along those lines with Jep as a mouthspeaker. But the fact is that this film is quite boring and slow, with a lot of meaningless shots that are typical of Sorrentino's works. Great aesthetics but overall pointless.
This must be one of these 'Art' movies. If you are not a specific fan of this kind of picture, better avoid The Great Beauty. Nothing of substance, only pretty shots here and there and boring, nonsensical dialog, plot and characters.
The movie teaches us two important life lessons and then demonstrates that the viewer who watched this film to the end failed to grasp them. At one point the main hero states that by the age of 75 he has learned not to waste time on something he doesn't like. I've made this mistake by watching this whole boring movie. And the second lesson is that hard work and sacrifice does not necessarily lead to anything meaningful in the end. Such is demonstrated by the unsatisfying movie culmination of pure gibberish, contrary to what we hoped for, considering it got an Oscar. The reason that this review gives this movie 2, not 1 or 0 is that the picture has a number of pleasing scenes (although some gross ones as well) and that the greatest beauty is indeed revealed in the end, although trivial, but nevertheless true. The greatest beauty is ****
Production Company
Indigo Film,
Medusa Film,
Babe Film,
Pathé,
France 2 Cinéma,
Mediaset,
Canal+,
Ciné+,
France Télévisions,
Regione Lazio,
Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (MiBAC),
Banca Popolare di Vicenza,
Roma Lazio Film Commission,
Eurimages,
MEDIA Programme of the European Union,
Biscottificio Verona