Paolo Sorrentino

Paolo Sorrentino (“The Great Beauty”) won the Jury Prize at Cannes with this sardonic satire about Giulio Andreotti, the controversial politician who was still alive when it reached cinemas. Andreotti was furious, but in the end he never took it to court. — In Rome in 1992, seven-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti sets his sights on the presidency while one corruption scandal after another breaks, and the people who have orbited him for forty years begin to talk. Andreotti himself hardly says a word. — Jury Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 2008 Nominated for Best Achievement in Makeup | Oscars | 2010 Best European Actor (Toni Servillo) | European Film Awards | 2008

Paolo Sorrentino turns a tender eye on old age, sending two men in their eighties to an Alpine hotel where they spend the days remembering. Harvey Keitel and Michael Caine, pop and classical, Paloma Faith and Maradona end up under one roof, and Caine said it was the best thing he’d ever been in. — Fred Ballinger, a retired composer, is spending the summer at an Alpine hotel with his friend and his daughter when an envoy from the Queen arrives. The Queen would like him to conduct his most famous piece at Prince Philip’s birthday. Ballinger turns the request down, and nobody can work out why. — Nomination for Best Original Song | Oscars | 2016 Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2015 Best European Film | European Film Awards | 2015 Best European Director | European Film Awards | 2015 Best European Actor (Michael Caine) | European Film Awards | 2015 Audience Award | Karlovy Vary International Film Festival | 2015 Nomination for Best Foreign Film | César Awards | 2015

Long before The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino’s second feature was a hyper-stylized existential drama — a demanding yet deeply rewarding gem. Featuring a dazzling performance by Toni Servillo as a man who seems to have been stripped of every trace of life. — A well-groomed middle-aged man from southern Italy has spent the past eight years living in an anonymous hotel in a nameless Swiss city, with no apparent occupation. Years of silence and countless cigarettes unfold in the hotel lobby, where he sits elegantly dressed yet denies himself any luxury. What are the unspoken secrets he carries? — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2004

Jep Gambardella turns sixty-five on a terrace overlooking the Colosseum, where the wild partying keeps running into an existential void. Sorrentino’s most Felliniesque tribute to Rome won him the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and it’s all painful revelry and, well, great beauty. — In summertime Rome, Jep Gambardella is sixty-five and still the most wanted guest at every dinner and party in town, and the best of them are the ones he throws himself on his terrace overlooking the Colosseum. Back when he was a young journalist, he wrote one novel, which won a prize and earned him a name as an artist. He hasn’t written a word since. — Oscar Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2014

Sean Penn saw “Il Divo” and asked to work with Sorrentino, who wrote him the part of a retired rock star made up like Robert Smith of The Cure. David Byrne plays on stage, and the rocker’s hunt for the SS man who tortured his father turns out to be less about revenge than about growing up very late. — Cheyenne is a retired rock star who still does his eyes the way he did when he was young, and for twenty years he has done almost nothing but sit at home in Dublin. When his father dies in New York, Cheyenne reads through his diaries and starts thinking about the SS man who tortured his father in Auschwitz. That man is still alive, somewhere in America. — Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 2011