The Great Beauty Review

A specific evocation of time and place that nonetheless continues to shape the global perception of Italian culture, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita is a film of such reflective surfaces that it practically defies homage. But that’s what Italian super-stylist Paolo Sorrentino has more or less attempted in this richly visualised, vignette-based meditation on 21st-century excess and ecstasy in the Italian capital, as seen through the eyes of Toni Servillo’s privileged but jaded journalist. At once damning and celebratory, the film’s extreme self-indulgence is rather its point; some will thrill to its florid sensibility, others may feel the need for a Maalox.