The film embodies the story of the famous Italian director who always remembers his first love during his childhood. One day, this director faces his childhood when he falls in love with films at his village theater and forges a deep friendship with one of the people on the stage.
In the director's cut, the film is not only a love song to the movies but it also is more fully an example of the kind of lush, all-enveloping movie experience it rhapsodizes.
Guardian
December 12, 2013
Cinema Paradiso is much loved, though I have occasionally been the man in the Bateman cartoon: the reviewer who confessed to finding Cinema Paradiso a bit sugary and the kid really annoying.
That balance of the ideal and the tragic weaves all throughout Cinema Paradiso, which is epic in terms of the time frame it covers, but feels consistently intimate
Still rapturous after all these years, Cinema Paradiso stands as one of the great films about movie love.
Daily Telegraph (UK)
December 12, 2013
Tornatore may have hit a sticky wicket with his subsequent work, but he knew what he was doing here: warning us about the irrational lure of the filmed past, which is to say cinema itself, then ushering us grandly to our seats.
Recent changes to cinema which have seen the projectionist's art sidelined in the digital age add a further layer of poignancy to the magical memories.
Returning to cinemas in spiffily remastered form ... the film retains its wide-eyed charm, pitched halfway between unrestrained romanticism and unknowing kitsch.