The Great Beauty (2013)
Movie · 2013 · Drama · 2h 22m · IT
Curator score: 8.9/10 (259.6K ratings)
Overview
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.
Ratings
- Curator score: 8.9/10
- IMDb: 7.7/10
- Letterboxd: 4.10/5
- Rotten Tomatoes: 91%
- Metacritic: 86
- TMDB: 7.5/10
Director
Paolo Sorrentino
Production
France 2 Cinéma, Indigo Film, Babe Films, Pathé
Cast
Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, Carlo Buccirosso, Iaia Forte, Pamela Villoresi, Galatea Ranzi, Franco Graziosi, Sonia Gessner, Giorgio Pasotti, Massimo Popolizio, Luca Marinelli, Vernon Dobtcheff, Anita Kravos, Roberta Cartocci, Lorenzo Gioielli, Giulia Di Quilio, Monica Piseddu, Anna Della Rosa, Luciano Virgilio
Where to watch
Max
Curator Review
Verdict
A lavish, melancholy, and often dazzling meditation on aging, art, status, and spiritual emptiness in Rome. It can feel self-conscious and overindulgent, but the visual command, tonal range, and emotional ache make it a major experience for viewers open to a baroque, essayistic style.
Best for
- Fans of visually opulent art-house cinema
- Viewers who like reflective films about aging, memory, and regret
- People drawn to satirical portraits of high society and cultural decadence
- Audiences who enjoy Fellini-adjacent, dreamlike city symphonies
Skip if
- You want a tightly plotted story with clear dramatic momentum
- You dislike stylized, self-aware, or mannered filmmaking
- You prefer understated realism over spectacle and symbolism
- You have little patience for long, digressive, conversation-heavy films
Overview
Paolo Sorrentino turns Rome into a living museum of pleasure, exhaustion, and haunted memory. The film follows Jep Gambardella as he drifts through parties, salons, and monuments, but the real subject is a life spent observing beauty from a distance and wondering what it has cost him. It is both decadent and mournful, often in the same breath.
Worth noting
What makes it memorable is the collision of excess and stillness. Sorrentino stages scenes with painterly precision, then lets them collapse into silence, irony, or grief. Some viewers will find the film smug or overstuffed, and that reaction is understandable; it is a movie that flaunts its intelligence and style. But the emotional undercurrent is real, and the film’s sense of time passing is unusually potent.
Bottom line
If it works for you, it works as a total atmosphere: a city portrait, a midlife reckoning, and a comedy of cultural vanity that keeps slipping into genuine sadness. It is not subtle, but it is often sublime. For viewers who want cinema to feel like a grand, restless conversation with beauty itself, this is an easy recommendation.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Remobo · 1616 likes
The ultimate Italian movie: 10% Nudity 10% Art and Fashion Snobbery 10% Meloncholic Nostalgia for a Time when Things Seemed More Alive, Because Aging Hits Differently in a City that is 28 Centuries Old. 5% Catholicism 65% Partying
Eli Hayes (5★) · 1491 likes
"This is my life...And it's nothing." Aptly titled, to say the least.Quite simply,A critique of,And an homage to, Everything. To the present,The past,The future. Everything. Sadness. Truth.Life.Beauty. Everything. The best comparison that I can make is if Emmanuel Lubezki and Larry David decided to collaborate on a film together in Rome. And the reason why this film works so well as both a comedy and also a poignant meditation on humanity is… more
DirkH (5★) · 722 likes
Film #167 of Make me watch your favourite.Recommended by Alberto. Without a doubt one of the most beautiful looking films of 2013. And one that proves that beauty does not only go skin deep, it goes a lot further if you allow it to. Watching The Great Beauty was an overwhelming experience. It comes at you full force, bombarding you with sensory overloads, only to become silent and contemplative the next minute. It is whimsical, much like the city… more
Nakul (5★) · 721 likes
"This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life. Hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah. It's all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise. Silence and sentiment. Emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity. All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world, blah, blah, blah... Beyond there is what lies beyond. I don't deal with what lies beyond. After all...… more "This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life. Hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah. It's all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise. Silence and sentiment. Emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity. All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world, blah, blah, blah... Beyond there is what lies beyond. I don't deal with what lies beyond. After all...… more
dan (4★) · 587 likes
intellectual masturbation
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Topics
art-house, drama, satire, melancholy, luxury, Rome, midlife crisis, visual spectacle, existential, contemporary Europe