Cinema Paradiso (1988) – Chiswick Cinema Film Club – Review by Andrea Carnevali

Chiswick Cinema Film Club is on July 14. Get your ticket now: chiswickcinema.co.uk/movie/fifth-birthday-party-cinema-paradiso/

Cinema Paradiso

★★★★★

A true cinematic masterpiece that has lost none of its power to devastate and enlighten, fifty years on.

I’ve been trying to take this film to my film club ever since we started back in January 2022. I cannot think of a better film to celebrate the Chiswick Cinema’s 5th birthday.

If you’ve been reading any of my reviews in the past few years, you know how I feel about cinema, and it’ll come as no surprise when I tell you that films do matter, not just as pieces of art or entertainment, but because they become the containers for our lives.

Years after we’ve watched a good film, we don’t just remember the plot or what it was about; we remember where we watched it, who we were sitting next to, and possibly who we were at that moment in time.

That is the real soul of Cinema Paradiso and what makes it so unique and perfect. There are so many movies about cinema and the love of cinema: classics like Singing in the rain or Day for Night, Woody Allens’ The Purple Rose of Cairo, Scorsese’s Hugo, and more recently, Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light (a wanna-be Cinema Paradiso) and even Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. (and I could go on forever), but hardly any of them gets close to Cinema Paradiso.

When it arrived in 1988, Cinema Paradiso almost felt like a farewell letter to the Golden Age of Italian cinema—the era of Fellini, De Sica and Rossellini—at a time when the industry seemed to have lost both its identity and its audience.

Ironically, this obituary for cinema became one of the very films that helped revive it, proving that the magic of the big screen was far from dead.

But Giuseppe Tornatore’s masterpiece is about something much larger that just cinema: it’s about memory. It’s a story about childhood, friendship, first love, and the heavy weight of leaving home.

The Paradiso itself becomes one of the film’s great characters. And we as the audience love watching it evolve alongside the fictional town of Giancaldo, shifting from a community centre and dream factory to a school and, quite literally, a church where the villagers gather for a “cinematic sacrament”.

And when at some point (minor spoiler here), the cinema burns down, and we see all those posters disintegrating in front of your eyes… it’s like seeing somebody we love dying in front of our eyes.

And it hurts (not to mention what happens towards the end). For somebody like me who left his country to go in search of a life in film-making, this film hits particularly hard. “Don’t ever come back” says Alfredo at some point (the beautifully poignant “Philip Noiret”) to young Toto in search of a life away from his little village : a phrase that’s been reverberating in my head so many times since I first came over to London.

And perhaps that’s why every technical choice Tornatore makes feels so effortless. Nothing calls attention to itself, and yet every image, every camera movement and every shaft of light seems designed to reinforce that sense of memory rather than reality.

The film seems to be obsessed with light: the harsh Mediterranean sun shining onto the camera lens, the flickering projector beam, and even the terrifying beauty of fire.

Which is, of course, exactly what cinema is: nothing more than light projected onto a screen. But because this is a film about memory, that light always feels romanticised, exaggerated, and beautifully idealised, just as our own memories do.

And that projector beam becomes a powerful symbol for storytelling and imagination, a literal “light in the dark” for a community plagued by post-war poverty.

The camera often places us at the eye-level of young Totò (the incredible Salvatore Cascio, one-of-a-kind find through a massive casting session), making the world feel larger, more mysterious, and more magical than it probably ever was.

Even the editing follows the logic of memory rather than chronology. Tornatore isn’t interested in documenting Totò’s life year by year; he skips effortlessly through time, allowing certain moments to linger while entire decades disappear in a single cut.

The transitions aren’t driven by plot. They’re driven by emotion. It’s exactly how we remember our own lives—not as a continuous story, but as a collection of fragments held together by feelings.

People vanish almost without warning. The ending itself is… well, an edit.

You cannot talk about this film without Ennio Morricone. His score is a miracle; he isn’t just scoring events on screen—he is scoring remembrance.

The “Main Theme” and the “Love Theme” (composed by his son, Andrea) hit so hard because they capture the precise emotion of looking backwards.

This is a film that celebrates cinema and mourns it simultaneously, acknowledging that while the big screen has been replaced by smaller ones, the images themselves remain immortal.

And then… there’s the ending, possibly one of the most beautiful finales in cinematic history.

Without giving anything away for those who have not seen it (shame of you!! Come to the film club now!!!), it is a stunning paradox.

Alfredo, who has spent the entire film teaching Totò that he must leave and never look back, gives his final gift to Toto to allow him to finally come home.

It is a culmination of everything the film has whispered to us about censorship, desire, memories, cinema and human connection, all condensed into a few minutes of pure cinema.

Hardly anything can touch your heart in quite the same way. No explanation is needed. Just images and music. Memories. There are few seats left, so you should grab your while you can.

Andrea Carnevali is a Bafta winning film maker who lives in Chiswick, and a co-creator of the Chiswick In Film festival.