I very nearly stopped watching The Great Beauty about half way through, as although the film starts and ends beautifully, it sags badly in the middle. I was going to say the plot gets lost, but that would be inaccurate, since the film really has no plot. Generally this is the sign of an over-rated European art-house film, but somehow Paulo Sorrentino manages to pull it off, and I was very glad I kept watching until the end. The Great Beauty is beautiful, touching, sometimes funny and often absurd. The cinematography is delicious, the characters are finely drawn, the music is lovely and the acting is excellent. And it's set in Rome. That, I suspect, is the main appeal of the film; if it had been set in, say, Wolverhampton, I might well have given up on it, which would have been a shame.
Review of The Great Beauty
