TSPDT

Key Production Countries: Italy, France, USA, UK
Key Genres: Drama, Psychological Drama, Thriller, Comedy, Romance, Family & Personal Relationships
Key Collaborators: Nicola Giuliano (Producer), Francesca Cima (Producer), Luca Bigazzi (Cinematographer), Toni Servillo (Leading Actor), Cristiano Travaglioli (Editor), Lino Fiorito (Production Designer), Umberto Contarello (Screenwriter), Angelo Curti (Producer), Andrea Occhipinti (Producer), Giogiò Franchini (Editor), Carlo Buccirosso (Leading Character Actor), Angela Goodwin (Leading Character Actress)

"[Sorrentino] has established one of the most distinctive signatures in cinema: fluid, audacious camera moves, grand tableaux vivants, montages cut like music videos, garish grotesques and sleek, modernist spaces. His cinema has often grappled with existential themes – power, spirituality, fate, meaning – and his protagonists are invariably lonely, melancholic men." - Steve Rose (The Guardian, 2021)

"The comparisons to Federico Fellini may be seen as both a blessing and a curse for Paolo Sorrentino. On one hand, the lofty likening to one of world cinema’s grand masters surely testifies to the quality of Sorrentino’s own work. And indeed, the two Italian auteurs do share numerous narrative and thematic affinities linking their films as imposing views of existential contemplation. At the same time, though, the all but inevitable nods to Fellini, which accompany most critical considerations of Sorrentino, depreciate his individually rightful place as a modern purveyor of contemporary socio-political conditions and overshadow his uniquely realized, deeply-felt depictions of universally complex humanity. " - Jeremy Carr (Senses of Cinema, 2022)

"Few Italian filmmakers since Fellini have paired sumptuous visual style with piquant social commentary as effectively as Paolo Sorrentino, who also brings a barbed sense of humor to the table that’s uniquely his own. Since moving from shorts and screenwriting to helming features in the new millennium, the Naples-born writer-director has been a favorite at Cannes – and throughout the cinema world since his breakthrough Oscar winner The Great Beauty." - American Cinematheque

"From his earliest productions to his more recent transnational works, Sorrentino has paid homage to Italy’s cinematic past while telling stories of masculine characters whose sense of self seems to be on the brink of dissolution. Together with his usual collaborators (including cinematographer Luca Bigazzi and editor Cristiano Travagliolo) and actors (chief among them Toni Servillo), Sorrentino has produced an incisive depiction of the contemporary European condition by means of an often spectacular postclassical style that nevertheless continues postwar Italian film’s tradition of political commitment." - Columbia University Press, 2020

"From the mid-Fifties into the early Seventies, Italian cinema enjoyed an extraordinary moment in which overtly political and vanguard filmmaking—by the likes of Marco Bellocchio, Pietro Germi and Elio Petri—found a lasting popularity and success that has since lingered only as a bittersweet memory. Celebrated screenwriter-director Paolo Sorrentino has proven himself an important exception through a series of stylistically audacious, vociferously outspoken and acclaimed films that have reignited the earlier promise of Italian cinema by using dark satire to define a contemporary and popular mode of political cinema." - Harvard Film Archive, 2020

"I am often told that my cinema is stylised. However, for me, the story and the rhythm are the most important things in a film. I don't think I have a style, but rather a rhythm that is repeated from film to film. However, it is true that I also choose a story because I feel that it will be visually interesting to adapt." - Paolo Sorrentino (Festival Lumière, 2021)