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[A] languorous, gorgeous-looking period piece... Sorrentino reteams with The Hand of God’s Daria D’Antonio, an excellent cinematographer who also happens to be a woman. But Porta/Parthenope is still shot as an object of desire. This may be the point, but it undermines the script’s nods to feminism, such as her focus on her career over motherhood.

For all of its surface-level pleasures, [Parthenope] often amounts to simply posing the facile question: “What if a woman were both beautiful and intelligent?” Will wonders never cease!

“Parthenope” is as tedious to synopsize as it is confounding to fathom... Sorrentino’s dialogue lurches from the aphoristic to the inscrutable without bringing the story into focus... Arguably, some of [the director's] points could have been lost in translation. Even so, it’s hard to imagine that any of this made more sense in the original Italian.

“Parthenope” shouldn’t have to strain as hard as it does — it plays like a fragrance ad. That qualifies as a disappointment for a filmmaker whose sensualist impulses are God-tier... With his overlong “Parthenope,” the mild suppressing of most of [Sorrentino's] Fellini-esque impulses in favor of a sexy Michelangelo Antonioni aura yields only scattershot results.

That the inner workings of women remain a great mystery to Sorrentino will surprise nobody familiar with his past films, which approached them with oneiric awe and eroticism. But with “Parthenope,” he’s fashioned an often transcendently alluring ode to letting the mystery be.

That’s ultimately what Parthenope is: a spectacle. Sorrentino frames stunning scenes, almost like a series of editorial fashion shoots, but the story becomes lost in the aesthetics.

“Parthenope,” like Sorrentino’s previous films, is an intentionally garish display of sex and luxury that is both irritating and oddly seductive... This is Sorrentino’s first movie in which the main character is a woman, and because he’s more interested in deifying Parthenope than he is in humanizing her, the portrait is inherently limited — and frequently dull.

Unlike Jep Gambardella, the intellectual protagonist of The Great Beauty, Parthenope lacks a believable interiority—which probably wouldn’t be as much of a problem if Sorrentino didn’t insist on structuring [the film] as a kind of old-fashioned intellectual bildungsroman.

Sorrentino is back on his proverbial bullshit with another sprawling flesh parade that’s more consumed with abstract ideals than it is with the stuff of life itself.

The pompous grandiosity of Sorrentino’s work is typically offset by his perverse sense of humor, but that’s less the case here than in the past, resulting in a ruinous chasm between what little the film offers intellectually and the self-importance with which it offers it.

Only Sorrentino could pull off something like this because his characters exist both as symbols and people. He makes resplendent movies that feel composed (visually and structurally) within an inch of their lives, but he lets in enough mystery that the people onscreen captivate us in unexpected ways.

So closely is Parthenope linked to Naples that one can say the film that bears their common name is a double portrait, interweaving the writer-director’s intense attraction for his character and his city in an impossible, mythic conjunction. Though it sounds like a complicated way to structure a movie, Sorrentino somehow makes it work in a film that is truly a sensual pleasure to watch.