Sorrentino

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The youthful exuberance and anguish of Paolo Sorrentino’s latest, The Hand of God—set in the world of his childhood, 1980s Naples—may come as a surprise to viewers familiar with the Italian filmmaker’s celebrated body of work. Perhaps best known to American audiences for his series The New Pope, Sorrentino has made himself at home in the corridors of power, from the Vatican to the Italian Chamber of Deputies—an observer of the creeping corruption and of the pathologies of middle age that often accompany the acquisition of influence. But what unites Sorrentino’s filmography, including The Hand of God, is his lavish visual imagination—a voluptuary taste for beauty tinged with regret and an appetite for the comically surreal. To mark the arrival of his nnnew movie on Netflix, we present a program of four of Sorrentino’s finest outsized ruminations on “success” and excess, movies so big that they threaten to spill off the screen.