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Critics reviews

REALITY

Matteo Garrone Italy, 2012
The Bangkok Post
Our tragic hero, an everyman who works in the market of Naples, is played by Aniello Arena (a real-life convict serving a life sentence) and it's his mix of candour and curiosity that gives this meandering film its soul. Garrone, the director, made a better film in the nail-biting mafia saga Gomorrah; his shot at pondering contemporary Italy here is admirable but somewhat weak.
June 5, 2015
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Unlike the damaged individuals who populate Garrone's other films, the logic of Luciano's attitude is subject to multiple interpretations within his social sphere. Michele, Luciano's partner in the fishmongering business, suggests that what Luciano is feeling isn't the pathology of TV obsession, but the omnipresence of the Lord, who sees all and takes notes for the final Judgment. This only complicates matters, which is precisely Garrone's point.
April 1, 2013
Matteo Garrone follows his crime epic Gomorrah(2008) with a comedy about reality TV, and though it hardly rivals the earlier movie in its social complexity, it still offers the spectacle of a vibrant and vividly realized Neapolitan neighborhood.
March 27, 2013
Garrone shot Reality in sequence and considered several endings, from the positive to the downright tragic. Given the director's clear affection for his protagonist, the oneiric ambiguity of the chosen finale should come as no surprise. Rather than a cop-out, it's very much in keeping with the tone of the film as a whole. Wisely going beyond tired arguments over Big Brother and reality TV, Reality works both as a modern fairytale and as a... contemporary take on the commedia all'italiana.
March 22, 2013
The parallels between seeking absolution from ephemeral media fame and God aren't subtle. "We're all watched," Luciano's devout friend Michele (Nando Paone) tells him. "Our lord observes." Luciano's paranoia increasingly confines the film to claustrophobic, inward spirals between impoverished locations. It's overextended satire, arguing its case with increasingly diminishing pungency.
March 14, 2013
...An oddly muffled character study cum media satire that is better visually conceptualized than narratively realized, and which doesn't have much in the way of emotional revelation for those likely to watch it stateside.
March 14, 2013
If "Reality" isn't quite as impressive as Garrone's 2008 "Gomorrah," an operatic and many-stranded saga about the long tentacles of Naples' criminal underworld, it makes clear that he's a filmmaker who can take a familiar story and infuse it with strangeness and vitality... [It's] a little bit Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," and a whole bunch Martin Scorsese's "The King of Comedy.
March 14, 2013
The New York Times
Directed by Matteo Garrone, "Reality" is a story about one man's desire to make it big on the small screen, and something of a familiar exploration of the blurring between reality and its simulations. More elliptically and more interestingly, it is also a look at an Italy engrossed with rituals and spectacle, in watching and being watched.
March 14, 2013
The God's-eye view in the final shot, if not on the level of Orwell, offers a bleak view of what people get in return for chasing Big Brother.
March 14, 2013
Garrone is in complete control of his thematic plutonium. Step by step, with a setup that evokes Honeymoonersepisodes, Reality builds to as scalding a vision of televisual simulacra and its maddened victims as Scorsese's The King of Comedy.
March 13, 2013
This vision of contemporary Italy as a warped fairyland filled with corpulent slobs and seedy C-grade celebrities recalls the tough-love spectacle of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, but Reality frustratingly devolves into a far more tedious mass-media morality tale. In case you haven't heard (or read any killjoy think pieces of the past 60 years), television will pervert your values and drain your brain, as will—another news flash!—churchly faith.
March 11, 2013
...The director has a pretty ingenious metaphorical thrust, one which equates the fame-seeking hordes of aspiring reality TV contestants with religious devotees clamoring for eternal salvation. Unfortunately, the whole thing never fully coheres. Garrone has a sure eye for outlandish set pieces that exhibit the expansive outlines of his ideas, but these spectacles are sporadic, and the spaces between them tend to lag.
March 11, 2013