Critics reviews

A celebration of cinema’s communal experience, this lovingly crafted ode to the joys projected upon the silver screen is a touching celebration of moviegoing.

If ever a movie came from the heart, it was Giuseppe Tornatore’s nostalgic Cinema Paradiso... It’s a real experience and a classic. But a sweet tooth is necessary.

A rhapsodic elegy to the thrall of filmgoing... Tornatore may have hit a sticky wicket with his subsequent work, but he knew what he was doing here: warning us about the irrational lure of the filmed past, which is to say cinema itself, then ushering us grandly to our seats.

Cinema Paradiso is a movie of glorious moments but it is undermined by its own chronic, nostalgia-fuelled soppiness. At times, the sentimentality risks becoming very cloying indeed.

Tornatore isn't able to let two minutes pass without having pint-sized cutie-pie and überscamp Salvatore Cascio offer a cheeky grin direct to the camera – it's so much easier than actually giving the character any kind of complexity, depth or texture. And when we're not given assuring smiles or end-of-the-pier high-jinx, that's when Ennio Morricone's godawful score is allowed to hector and dominate, thrashing down everything in its toxically saccharine wake.

[Cinema Paradiso has a] wide-eyed charm, pitched halfway between unrestrained romanticism and unknowing kitsch. It’s never exactly been fashionable to like ‘Cinema Paradiso’, and time won’t have done much to soften the sneers of dissenters. But the advantage of brazen sentimentality is that it gives the film very little to lose.

Cinema Paradiso is a wonderful film, completely faultless. Direction: perfect. Acting: perfect. Script, cinematography, editing, musical score: perfect... It's a magical and emotional example of filmmaking at its finest.

A Precious Moments figurine of a film, Cinema Paradiso serves as Tornatore's love letter to the movies, as well as to a colorful small-town Sicily so ridiculously idealized it's a wonder anybody ever leaves... Like its famous final scene, Paradiso is nothing but ecstatic climaxes. Tornatore seems intent on charming viewers into submission, but after a while all the wonder, awe, and movie magic become deadening.

this is both an unashamedly sentimental rite-of-passage picture and a charming reminder of the lost magic of cinema-going... It's the patrons of the village cinema in Sicily who give the film its irresistible flavour, entering into the spirit of each and every movie, and treating the cinema as a part of life, not just an escape from it.

Transcending boundaries of arthouse and subtitle, Cinema Paradiso wraps you in a tender embrace and refuses to let go. And if you haven't blubbed by the time a fortysomething Salvatore plays Alfredo's long-hidden gift, then you're most likely dead... This is food for the weary soul.

The earliest parts of the movie are the most magical. Then things grow predictable: There are not many rites of passage for an adolescent male that are not predictable and not many original ways to show the death of a movie theater, either... Yet anyone who loves movies is likely to love "Cinema Paradiso,"

For the most part, this hamfisted movie is very enjoyable. Despite his crowding of the film with familiar Italian-character cutouts (screaming parents, admonishing priests, masturbating boys and, yes, even a town idiot), screenwriter/director Tornatore gives these and other cliches an entertaining flow, a certain Mediterranean deliriousness.