La grande bellezza 2013

Richard and Mary Corliss, TIME Magazine: [Sorrentino] stuffs, nearly engorges, this 2 hour-and-20-minute film with outrageous and gloriously visual anecdotes. Read more

Kyle Smith, New York Post: There's an exhilarating sadness to it all that amounts to cinematic poetry. Read more

John Hartl, Seattle Times: At times it seems that every frame is a tribute to the Fellini classics of the early 1960s. Read more

Jay Weissberg, Variety: Rome in all its splendor and superficiality, artifice and significance, becomes an enormous banquet too rich to digest in one sitting in Paolo Sorrentino's densely packed, often astonishing The Great Beauty. Read more

Mike D'Angelo, AV Club: Once the film settles down, it becomes a rollicking yet melancholy tour of a city so spectacular and historic that it paralyzes its inhabitants. Read more

Peter Keough, Boston Globe: Paolo Sorrentino's overwrought, Felliniesque opus ... Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: 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. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: 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. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: The melancholy in this film is just as trumped up as the frenzy. Read more

Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News: Go ahead. Soak up the Beauty. It's one of the best films of the year. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: 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. Read more

Jordan Hoffman, Film.com: A maximalist's delight. Read more

Wesley Morris, Grantland: 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. Read more

Deborah Young, Hollywood Reporter: Referencing without imitating Fellini, Sorrentino offers an amusing update on Italian society at the end of a cycle. Read more

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: "The Great Beauty" is drop-dead gorgeous, a film that is luxuriously, seductively, stunningly cinematic. Read more

Michael Nordine, L.A. Weekly: Though there's precious little drama, Sorrentino's skills as an image-maker are indisputable. Read more

David Thomson, The New Republic: This is a Fellini project, if you like, but it is a film full of music, dance, Rome's creme brulee light and a sensual tenderness, so that it might have been made by Renoir. Read more

John Anderson, Newsday: 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. Read more

Anthony Lane, New Yorker: 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. Read more

Ella Taylor, NPR: A fantastic journey around contemporary Rome and a riot of lush imagery juggling past and present, sacred and profane, gorgeous and grotesque. Read more

Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News: It's a glorious experience, one that blends both compassionate dismay and wry delight over Italy's own, eternal excess. Read more

Manohla Dargis, New York Times: A deliriously alive movie, "The Great Beauty" is the story of a man, a city, a country and a cinema, though not necessarily in that order. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: 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. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: "The Great Beauty" resembles a contemporary "La Dolce Vita," Fellini's surreal 1960 tribute to Rome's splendor, self-indulgence and superficiality. Read more

Jon Frosch, The Atlantic: A vivid glimpse, both funny and deeply unsettling, of a Berlusconi-era Italy rotting below its luscious-looking surface. Read more

Geoff Pevere, Globe and Mail: 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. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: A riotous film that finds depth, clarity and refreshment in even the shallowest of pools. Read more

Dave Calhoun, Time Out: Sorrentino is so often compared to Fellini that it feels right that he has made the city of 'La Dolce Vita' the focus for this heady, beautiful, entrancing film. Read more

Michael Atkinson, Village Voice: Sorrentino's vision is the size of Rome itself, and his confidence is dazzling. Read more

Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine/Vulture: 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. Read more