The Great Beauty

Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty, Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee for best Foreign Language Film, boasts inventive and opulent visuals that are sumptuously over-the-top. It's a vision of modern-day Rome as a disco-ball-lit crypt, a place where even youthful decadence is in decay. The protagonist Jep (Toni Servillo) is a longtime lion of Rome's fashionably debauched scene, a writer who only produced one highly regarded novel before wasting his next four decades as a sleazy journalist. Upon turning 65, he begins to question his life of nihilism, especially reflecting on the adolescent love he can barely remember. Clearly indebted to Italian maestro Federico Fellini, Sorrentino essentially takes the paparazzo from La Dolce Vita, ages him several decades, stirs in some 8 1/2-like stylized self-analysis, and shoots it all with the lavish colors and swirling memory structure of later Fellini works like Amarcord.