Popular reviews

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 36

  “L’Innocente” has a gilded statue where its heart should be, and cold gusts of wind instead of blood flowing through its veins. 

  The final work of director Luchino Visconti, “L’Innocente” is a farewell to cinema and mannered society that questions the validity for the endurance of both art, and aristocracy. 

  The film depicts the entanglements of Tullio Hermil; a wealthy man who neglects his wife in favor of his mistress. He is shown to bear little passion for either woman, or even for the perpetuation of his own self-existence. 

  In a career that resurrected fascist opportunists and siblings plotting matricide, Tullio is among the most vile of all Visconti’s screen personages. He carries about his destruction of others’ lives without…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★ 7

  Spoilers in the second-to-last paragraph.

  As with much of director Luchino Visconti's work, his final film, The Innocent, is made weighty by the pull of luxurious fabrics: wallpapers; crisply ironed; custom suits; brand new dresses; wraps and veils of the finest silks and furs and tulles. Trapped in the world of the Italian elites, we are first battered and then lulled into passivity by the superficial: bright, flawless surfaces; flashing, false smiles; fur wraps donned to cover up a broken marriage.

  In a film so consumed by what is presented to the public, the glimpses we are granted behind the curtain (behind the personal facades) are rare indeed, particularly when they allow us to see into the private lives of…

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  Review by MUBI

  The final film by Luchino Visconti (La terra trema, The Leopard) offers a welcome return to the resplendent period dramas that followed his neorealist period. Visconti was an aristocrat with Marxist tendencies, and L’innocente is a sublime critique of the immoral excesses of the upper classes.

  Now streaming in 🇺🇸 and 🇨🇦 here.

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★½ 4

  Absolutely splendorous! A legendary Italian auteur, distinguishable from beginning to end, culminates his impressive body of work with the ideas that he first developed in Senso (1954) all the way through Il Gattopardo (1963) and Ludwig (1973). This swayingly conceived drama strips down the superficial pompousness and lavishness of the Italian turn-of-the-Century aristocracy, revealing the group of social conventionalisms as a mask of hypocrisies in a web of treasons, irrational passions and disgusting self-interests. An impeccable direction highlights the main thematic intention of Visconti since the 60s, that is, to construct a cinema of contrasts: romance vs. affairs, lies vs. truths, secrets vs. confessions, atheism vs. God (both inclinations ironically sustained by the protagonist in different points of the story),…

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  Review by Bruno Andrade ★★★★½

  Aqui está, em primeiríssima mão, gentileza do Rafael Dornellas, o texto do Paul Vecchiali sobre a versão francesa mutilada de La prima notte di quiete, que é na realidade um texto sobre Cronaca familiare, e mais precisamente um pequeno tratado sobre a situação e a posição específica do Zurlini no contexto do cinema italiano do pós-guerra.

  E, também por gentileza do Rafael, o texto do Vecchiali sobre L'innocente, do qual colarei uns trechos abaixo:

  
  Sempre atrasados por pelo menos dois filmes, os detratores de Visconti acabaram por admitir que a exuberância do décor, o aparato da disposição em imagens e o refinamento da dramaturgia são sempre acompanhados, profundamente, por uma análise político-social do universo fechado no qual as personagens se…

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  Review by Matthew LeCHARLTON ★★★

  Beautiful to view but indulges in the swooning as the plot to scene ratio may be too slow for even the most patient of audiences. Characters also range from unlikeabke to being a bit to dull. 

  The interior design, music and direction comes from a man at the top of his game, shame he chose this piece of literature and to express it this way.

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  Review by David Conner ★★★★★

  It’s strange that this would be one of the lesser known and harder-to-find Visconti films because it’s certainly one of the Viscontiest. His lavish, ornamental aesthetic has never been more fully realized than it is here, and his favorite themes of infidelity, decadence and the moral bankruptcy of the upper classes are pursued with an especially pitiless vigor. 

  As with so many of his later films, the question of Visconti’s “queer sensibility” is hard to disentangle from his Marxian penchant for self-indictment, given that his own lifestyle wasn’t all that dissimilar to that of his louche anti-hero, Tullio (here played with bewitching bad-boy aplomb by the never-sexier Giancarlo Giannini). On the surface, the anti-elitist politics of the film seem obvious.…

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  Review by Kosta Jovanović ★★★★

  Giancarlo Giannini's Tullio is one of cinema's silent villains, unnoticeable in ranks among the vilest creatures silver screen had to offer. The worst of all, he easily transcends the celluloid and exist in our world. Shifting liberal views on love to further his own ego and malicious lust while simmering his furious but silent anger when his ill calculated wife tries to have a similar approach. In his misogynistic ways, he tries to equalize women to objects of desire. Self loathing, sweet lies, infanticide or rape, nothing is out of rich if he stays in his current position of power. And all this disgusting display is framed in the lushest of colors and sets, typical of the master, as Visconti makes his final film about the decadence of the aristocracy.

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  Review by Gvolpe ★★½

  The costumes, the setting...it’s a Visconti film, it’s going to be beautiful. Also, really nice of him to cast Massimo Troisi for his first and last film. Giancarlo Gianinni has the pretty face but not the acting skills. The Leopard has all of this but great acting and a better story! It just sets the bar way toooo high for Visconti’s later films. It’s Way too powerful.  Although,  I think I’ve mostly overdosed on Aristocracy. After a while, to put it bluntly, I don’t care. Suck it up, you have all the women in the world. Stop having affairs, stop getting jealous.....you swim in wealth, you swine. No hate towards Visconti, because he makes this bearable, Innocence did not do much for me. 

  
  Side note: Nudity also makes this film bearable. Laura Antonelli and Jennifer O’Neil😳

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  Review by dsol15 ★★★½

  Unfamiliar with Visconti’s game, maybe I’m at a disadvantage here in starting with his final film. Maybe one of the most exact feeling period films I’ve ever seen—the detail is impeccable and you do come away feeling like you have an understanding what it would be like to be alive in that time and place.

  But wow—are the characters tough. Complex to be sure, but they’re all on various points on the insufferable asshole spectrum. The performances themselves are interesting, but there is a lot of performance and maybe not enough variation or focus on other relationships to make them a bit more endurable.

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  Review by Stephen M ★★★★ 4

  Visconti's final film - a melodramatic late 19th century story of an amoral aristocrat and his wife and mistress - is sumptuous in period detail but languidly paced and somewhat formal. I admired it more than loved it. But its classic Visconti in its themes, operatic style and connection with a literary source.

  The contemporary concepts of male and class privilege are exemplified in the main character Tullio Hermil, played by the reigning Italian sex symbol of the early 1970s Giancarlo Giannini who shot to international stardom by his association with director Lina Wertmuller. Tullio embodies toxic male narcissism, flaunting his mistress in front of his wife and incredulous when she has an affair of her own. He wants to…

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  Review by BrandonHabes ★★★★½ 1

  Wow. I mean, emphatically, wow. Just when I thought Visconti was on his downward slope ready to fade out like a candle, he returns to form in a career high pulverizer that left me picking my stomach from off the floor. A stunning, hard-hitting, operatic finale to an awesome body of work, led by a character I absolutely despised and will consider to be the most hated in his filmography next to Martin von Essenbeck. For his dark-hearted swan song, the master of decay and dissolution returns to themes and images he knows best — aristocratic yuppies stained by their passions, tortured by their repressions, and trapped within worlds of opulence of the most incredible magnitude. Luxury leads way to decadence leads…