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A famous Italian filmmaker, haunted by the memories of his first love, recalls his childhood when he fell in love with the movies at his village's theater and formed a deep friendship with the theater's projectionist.
The heightened symmetry of this new/old Cinema Paradiso makes the film a fuller experience, like an old friend haunted by the exigencies of time.
July 19, 2002
Q Network Film Desk
That balance of the ideal and the tragic weaves all throughout Cinema Paradiso, which is epic in terms of the time frame it covers, but feels consistently intimate
Recent changes to cinema which have seen the projectionist's art sidelined in the digital age add a further layer of poignancy to the magical memories.
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 much loved, though I have occasionally been the man in the Bateman cartoon: the reviewer who confessed to finding Cinema Paradiso a bit sugary and the kid really annoying.
Still rapturous after all these years, Cinema Paradiso stands as one of the great films about movie love.
July 11, 2002
Time Out
Returning to cinemas in spiffily remastered form ... the film retains its wide-eyed charm, pitched halfway between unrestrained romanticism and unknowing kitsch.
In the director's cut, the film is not only a love song to the movies but it also is more fully an example of the kind of lush, all-enveloping movie experience it rhapsodizes.
July 19, 2002
Detroit Free Press
The film's final hour, where nearly all the previous unseen material resides, is unconvincing soap opera that Tornatore was right to cut.