Parthenope

Paolo Sorrentino goes home to Naples and follows one woman's life from her birth in 1950 to 2023. Celeste Dalla Porta plays the young Parthenope in her first film, with Stefania Sandrelli as the older version. Gary Oldman turns up briefly and memorably as the writer John Cheever. It competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2024 and got a nine-and-a-half-minute standing ovation without winning anything. The reviews split hard. On one side, Sorrentino's visual command; on the other, the charge that he had arrived at self-parody, with one critic writing that he seemed more interested in deifying Parthenope than in humanising her. Rotten Tomatoes settled at 46 percent, Metacritic at 52 out of 100. The box office was poor too: 11.7 million dollars worldwide against a 32.6 million euro budget. Who it is for: viewers devoted to Sorrentino's image-making and to Naples. Who it is not for: anyone hoping for the woman's own point of view. The film builds her almost entirely as something to be looked at, and that criticism sticks.