Paolo Sorrentino

Cannes Film Festival 2013 highlights

Hannah McGill tells us what's worth caring about in this year's Cannes Film Festival line up

What is the Cannes film festival, apart from a beach resort shindig where starlets model frocks, Lars Von Trier winds people up, and headline writers are driven to terrible Cannes/can puns? The film festival was set up in 1946 as a free world rival to…

August 2012 books round-up: debut fiction

First time authors this month include Paolo Sorrentino, Ariel S Winter and Sabina Berman

Whether you’re lazing on a beach or stuck indoors from the rain, there’s a host of exciting new debut fictions out in August for you to tear through. Film buffs will know Paolo Sorrentino from his directorial work on the likes of Il Divo and This Must…

This Must Be the Place

Bracing aesthetic and gentle humanity despite risking absurdity at times

(15) 119min There is a strong sense of the baroque running through the films of Paolo Sorrentino, not least his bravura portrait of former Italian Prime Minister Andreotti in Il Divo. His first English language venture This Must Be The Place neither…

Director Paolo Sorrentino discusses the Sean Penn-starring This Must Be the Place

The drama merges themes of America, rock music and the Holocaust

The protagonist at the heart of Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must be the Place isn’t your typical Nazi-hunter. Endearingly played by Sean Penn, Cheyenne is a retired rock star, now living in Dublin, whose mental and physical faculties have been impaired by…

Il Divo

BIOPIC/DRAMA With Il Divo, the Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (The Consequences of Love, The Family Friend) has spectacularly reinvented the genre of the political biopic. The subject of this darkly amusing and often exhilarating film is…

The Family Friend

The Neapolitan writer-director Paolo Sorrentino follows up his sleek Mafia thriller The Consequences of Love with the wonderfully eccentric and unpredictable The Family Friend, which he has described as ‘a dive into humanity and its degeneracy’.