The Great Beauty
The Great Beauty
| 21 May 2013 (USA)
The Great Beauty Trailers

Jep 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.

Reviews
UnowPriceless hyped garbage
Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.
Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.
Winning Winning La Grande Bellezza offers great views of Rome and shows its sights and beautiful corners as well as its more normal, but not less beautiful, spots and places. The cast is without exception proper, in particular Toni Servillo, lending wit, elegance, wisdom, imagination, and tactfulness to the stories' protagonist Jep Gambardella. Although the film is not a particularly short one, director Paolo Sorrentino accomplished to leave out all the unnecessary things with which most directors would have subtracted some quality from the film's storyline. That, in my opinion, is the movie's biggest asset. As brilliant as the movie's storytelling, cast, and setting is, the soundtrack of La Grande Bellezza needs to be mentioned as well. Melancholic English pop songs and Italian chants and classical pieces create a sound melting into the pictures and dialogues and creating a huge intensity and fascination.After all, La Grande Bellezza is a movie one must watch rather than read about for its great strength is in the emotions and the joy it evokes rather than in intellectual and philosophical insights - which it nonetheless offers as well.
bsw-26149 What a beautiful film. As has been written in other reviews, the themes of this movie are quite simple actually: getting old, the difficulty of appreciating the day-to-day, overcoming cynicism and all the beauty that we become numb to. What stands out is the unexpected choices Sorrentino makes in his direction. The ancient saint sitting atop a throne kissing the hands of assorted religious leaders as they approach one by one, only to kick off her right shoe like a little child. The CGI giraffe whose presence in the scene is a 40-foot underscoring of an important point. The blood on the head of an artist who runs headfirst into a wall, to the bemused and bored delight of the high-society crowd.This movie is as classically beautiful as any, but it is not content to stop there, always taking one step further, one risk more, and always in the most unexpected of ways.Highly recommended.
valadas This looks like to be the message of the movie or at least the opinion of its main character, Jep Gambardella, a journalist who has failed as a writer. He has nevertheless ambitions and opinions about life and the world in his beautiful house in Rome with a view to the Colosseum. But when he reaches 65 he realizes that he has wasted his life in mundane high society parties being much endeared by the women even at that age. He becomes then very disillusioned and seeks often refuge in memories and nostalgia of the past. All this develops itself in beautiful images and scenes of interiors and exteriors and beautiful film framings including of mundane parties and balls. There are also discussions sometimes superficial, sometimes deeper about human nature and the life and behaviour of this or that character. We must not forget that we are among high society members. No worker or proletarian is ever seen. We see a lot of characters sometimes very strange in terms of faces and behaviours. A good movie about life or at better its vacuity for those who think so.
zika-84755 I started to watch it without any high expectations but the film truly surprised me. Deep,sophisticated, intelligent, full of meaning, every frame on point. This film is a real piece of art, high-end product of cinema, an aesthetic pleasure. The mere watching and listening to the sheer beauty of the succession of images and conversations will bring an emotional dreamer like me to tears because of sweet, almost physical ache. The thing is that the plot doesn't matter that much, it is not the main focus. One just drowns in your own thoughts and emotions the film creates. I remained captured by it until the last minute and a long time after watching it. For those who find it boring - this is not your typical flick that will entertain you the way you are used to. It is not in any sense a crowd pleaser.