Popular reviews

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  Review by trolleyfreak ★★★★★ 23

  10 Reasons why I adore Luchino Visconti's Le Notti Bianche:

  1. It's the second radical film interpretation of a Fyodor Dostoyevsky story (in this case his short work White Nights) from the '50's, equal in quality to Akira Kurosawa's tremendous version of The Idiot (1951).

  2. Despite having a CV littered with such masterpieces as Ossessione, La Terra Trema, Senso, Rocco And His Brothers and The Leopard, none of them contains the romantic longing of this picture.

  3. It's entirely studio-bound with one of the most gorgeous, elaborate and claustrophobic sets you could ever wish to see, recreating a typical '50's Italian street complete with gas stations, shops, bars and restaurants and neon signs, creating a deliberately artificial setting.

  4.…

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★½ 10

  Five reasons to watch Visconti's lightest and most tender romance movie:

  1) Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
  2) Nino Rota's mysterious score.
  2) The most dream-like and romantic use of snow in a black-and-white feature.
  4) Maria Schell's laugh.
  5) Marcello Mastroianni's dance move improvisation.

  94/100

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★★ 35

  In “Le Notti Bianche,” the city unfolds for its central couple as if it was built specifically to contain their love.

  And it was. 

  Luchino Visconti’s adaption of a seminal Dostoevsky short story, “Bianche” depicts an encounter between a woman awaiting her missing paramour, and a man awaiting a purpose in his drifting life. 

  “Bianche” is a midpoint between the high camp theatricality of “Senso,” and the neorealism of “Ossessione.” Its streets are ragged and torn, its background subjects firmly working class… but they are all only as real as they exist in the imagination of the film’s protagonists. 

  As leads Marcello Mastroianni and Maria Schnell wander through a city where it is perpetually evening… signs are illuminated as they…

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  Review by Lara Pop ★★★★★ 63

  #Existential Musings Vol. 9.
  #Le Notti Bianche
  #Visconti

  
  even a moment’s worth [of love] can last a lifetime

  1. Prologue.

  The snow has stopped falling. The ground was sprinkled with the snowflakes of purity, and the white footpath glistened despite the gray clouds hanging over its brilliance. The path followed the curve of the landscape, gently sloping up and down as it drew the sketch of the bridge and breathed life into the scene.

  A man stood on the bridge, evidently waiting for someone. Another man stood farther away by a snow-covered wall, looking towards the bridge. He had to heavily lean onto the wall for support. Was he perhaps tired? Tired from his day, tired from life? There seemed…

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  Review by spap1 ★★★★½ 12

  where are they?

  i look, but my eyes sear, they sizzle, as though the sun were darting it’s shards of nightmares toward me. i look, but i cannot see them. 

  as you ran into my life, the dark streets, full of sorrow and solemn thoughts, enlivened with passion, desire, rage. they became what a street is meant to show:

  a canvas of humanity,
  bursting with colour, reaching to every edge.

  but once you had walked away, once you left again, it disappeared. the canvas had left. 

  i wasn’t sure where it had gone to, but i believe i know now.

  to me, you were everything. yet, to me, you were nothing.

  with you, the world existed. it turned. the ancient…

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  Review by Eric Eidelstein ★★★★½ 2

  When you're lonely it's a simple thing to project all of your desires onto a person — perhaps a beautiful person you run into on a bridge — and call that love. Visconti's film isn't a tragic love story. Rather, it's a film about the comfort we find in our delusions and obsessions. It seems safer to convince yourself you're madly in love with someone who will never love you back, who is too stupid to love you back, than cope with the fact that you're alone and unwanted. Eventually, if you're smart — and Marcello Mastroianni's Mario is too far gone — you realize that your obsessiveness, your ceaseless desire to connect with someone who is incapable of connecting back, hurts even more than being stuck with yourself.

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★½

  Mastroianni's performance is incredible, one of the best in movies. Alongside Diaz's Norte this is one of the two great Dostoevsky adaptations, and the leap this has over the Robert Bresson and James Gray adaptations is that this one doesn't limit its perspective to the mans, but incorporates the woman's equally. The dance sequence in the films back half is probably the best of its kind; like when you're at the club with someone you're interested in but aren't sure about, the feeling is quite literally mutual, trying to dance together, maybe the shyness gets to you, even the goofy dance Mastroianni puts on, either way its the combination of the liberation of the space and uncertainty of the situation…

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  Review by Holli ★★★★½ 1

  "god bless you for the moment of happiness you gave me. even a moment's worth can last a lifetime."

  thank you luchino visconti i'm a sobbing mess who no longer believes in love

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  Review by Laura 3

  loving someone comes so easily, and only gets complicated when we realize they can love us back. then what’s natural becomes shadowed by trying to prove something. losing ourselves, and maybe even that spark too, in the hope of reciprocation. suddenly nothing is true, and nothing is easy, and the shadow swallows up what you thought could be yours.

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  Review by Zoë 🐝 ★★★★★

  I am a broken woman.

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★ 10

  And to think I almost gave up on Visconti. After being slightly underwhelmed by everything but the first act of Rocco and His Brothers, then repeled by the aristocratic decadence of The Leopard, disappointed by The Damned and disgusted by Death in Venice, I have found the Visconti for me in Le Notti Bianche. Pining for love, conveyed through cinematic restraint, yet Visconti knows when to turn up the dramatic dial and tug at the heart strings of the viewer. Since he does this sparingly, it becomes much more effective than your typical melodrama. This film is romantic, longing perfection. What impressed me most, though, is the impeccably crafted set design. Shot entirely on a studio lot, Visconti recreates the Tuscan city…

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  Review by buster1895 9

  I think I WOULD have really liked this movie.

  Unfortunately, the theater was full of solipsistic millennial fuckbags, who could not get over the apparently hilarious fact that human beings existed before them, and that context exists beyond their entitled bubbles.

  No one gives a radioactive tit what you have to say during a movie, so SHUT YOUR FUCKING PHONE OFF AND SHUT YOUR GOB. If you can't do those two things, stay out of the theater. And also die, thanks.