Popular reviews

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★★ 26

  Luchino Visconti’s “Senso” makes high art out of camp in the same way that da Vinci made painted masterpieces out of mere oils. 

  With “Bellissima” acting as Visconti’s rejection of neorealism’s shabby facade, the director turned to create a film that would make all other cinema look as cheap as a balsa wood backdrop. 

  “Senso” - which depicts the illicit love affair between an Italian countess and an Austrian military officer - begins in opulence. La Fenice opera house in Venice appears in such fully realized vivacity, that stills from “Senso” were eventually used to reconstruct the building after it burned down in an arson attack. 

  A key piece of coding to understand “Senso” arrives in this prologue. As Alida…

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★½ 2

  41/100

  No real way to avoid sounding like a Philistine here, so I'll just resign myself to my fate. Like most stories involving romantic and/or sexual masochism, it's just profoundly uninteresting to me—from the jump, it's clear that Valli's Countess has idiotically hitched her lust-wagon to a scoundrel, and there's no modulation whatsoever thereafter. She just keeps being foolish and he just keeps taking advantage. (I have the same issue with many Fassbinder films, for the record, especially Fox and His Friends.) Their final scene together, in which he drops the pretense and openly humiliates her in front of a hooker, rings especially false to me; it's suggested that his attack is motivated primarily by self-loathing, but that doesn't jibe…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★½

  Italian director Luchino Visconti assigns some of the heaviest usages of Technicolor beyond the boundaries of a Hollywood studio production with Senso, an emotionally charged and historical saga. It’s an adaptation of Camillo Boito's 1882 novella with a dramatic commandeering of cinematography by G.R. Aldo, and the motion of the camera is consistently outstanding, from the luxurious tracking shots that emphasise physical geometry to the tensely-composed stationary shots which concentrate on the features of the aristocracy. The narrative, which takes place during the third Italian war of independence, possesses a delicate sense of putrescence around its perimeters highlighting its corruptness and heinousness.

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  Review by mari. ★★★★★ 5

  farley granger's silly little dubbing voice is actually sooooo camp. movies that ask the question if it's gay to be in a doomed romance with a countess who's betraying her country for you. this was awesome and pretty much all i could ever want from this kind of melodrama and also SO stunning! loved the dramatic scenes where the score was veeery obviously turned extra loud as if the everything else wasn't enough already like thanks for this mr. visconti maybe i will have to give your movies another chance

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★½ 2

  “Reason has nothing to do with war”

  Nor does it with love. 

  Senso sees Visconti at his most contemptuous of both traitor and patriot—not only to country, but to self as well. And I ask you, what is worse? Betrayal of one’s homeland or oneself? Equally detestable, our two main characters are neither loyal or deceitful; they each have their agendas and are each aware of the transgressions of the other. Countess Livia ignores what she knows to be true about her lover in the name of what is either a misguided affection or emotional masochism, while Lieutenant Franz is simply in it for the almighty dollar; he knows the stakes and the potential consequences that may befall him if he…

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  Review by Ethan Lyon ★★★½ 5

  6th Luchino Visconti (after The Leopard, Ludwig, The Innocent, Ossessione and The Damned)

  A pithy review of this film would probably run something like 'When the dick is so good it makes you betray your country', but sadly I have never been one for pith. This was Visconti's first real film in his mature style, one that blended an incredible eye for historical detail with an emphasis on the luxuries of emotional masochism to an unfeeling figure of domination. He hadn't got the mixture quite right at this point, but it's still a fascinating film held together by a great performance by Alida Valli's countess, who throws away all her principles in a chance love affair with a complete scoundrel…

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  Review by ncgraham ★★★

  none of this would have happened if she'd just fucked her hot antifa cousin instead

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  Review by Willow Maclay

  spoilers of a sort

  It is the choice to pay his way out of military service, which ultimately proves to be the cataclysmic event in their relationship. While sitting in his hotel and indulging in alcohol and women he sees his brothers carted off to their graves, and he knows he has played a part in their death by his refusal to serve out their revolutionary praxis and the guilt turns his love to hate. In his eyes she has castrated him by dangling the notion of love in front of his face; defiled him and wounded him as a man, by tempting him with the soft embrace of a life that is filled only with the decadence that she…

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ★★★★★

  Visconti's brutally tragic romance seen through the elegant scope of 19th-century Venice, an emotion-driven roller coaster of irrational reactions fragmented into little pieces of lust, love, tears and treason. Suddenly, the scope maximizes and the imminent social conflict, Italy's struggle for liberation (which was used during the first half of the movie merely as a background), explodes and sends our doomed protagonists into destinies forged by a mastermind of Greek tragedies. Gorgeous!

  99/100

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  Review by Liz ★★★★½

  Opens with a production of Il trovatore being interrupted by a political protest. We never see the conclusion of that opera -- instead, the activists and targets become the players in an entirely different one informed by Hollywood melodrama. It's funny to hear that Visconti's top three choices for the male lead were Marlon Brando, Tab Hunter, and Farley Granger, because there's such a queer ambiguity to the role and an aloofness in his half of the bloodless romance that forms the basis for the sweeping narrative. If there's any fault here, it's the boring war sequences that don't really serve any purpose other than to act as a loud, unofficial intermission before the final act. Fewer weekend war reenactments and more Farley Granger lounging in a granary, please!

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  Review by BrandonHabes ★★★★½ 1

  In which Visconti sheds the gritty skein of proletarian neorealism and addresses class struggle at a much higher, more elegant pitch. SENSO is what we might refer to as romantic realism, sensual realism, or what Phillip Lopate calls “operatic realism.” We are no longer mired among the poor or steeped in working class despair, as Visconti’s technicolor flourishes and gilded set pieces are more interested in exposing the decadent aristocracies. Marxists have long convinced us that “class struggle” is an exclusive dialectic between rich/elite and poor/commoners, but Visconti seems to repurpose the term or at least suggest a spectrum on which the elite and the bourgeois can be seen eating themselves alive in a similar, albeit elevated pattern. Born into…

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  Review by Stephen M ★★★★

  A rewatch of Visconti's "Senso" reminded me of all the things I like about this film. It's like an opera, which is no surprise given the director's work in this medium: intense melodrama and emotions, a turbulent historical background, vivid colors, sumptuous interior sets and a tragic ending. I especially like the wonderful shots of Venice and the authentic 19th-century period details and costumes. It also has great use of classical music in the soundtrack, as Visconti does in other films. Here it's Bruckner's 7th Symphony.

  The story is dramatic and occasionally over-the-top: During the Austrian occupation of Venice, an Italian countess who's a Nationalist sympathizer and unhappily married to an older noble who's collaborating with the occupiers, falls in…