Ultimately, Sorrentino’s sympathies lie with Berlusconi because – in their vacuity and their need to impress – they have something in common.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
It’s a flawed, undigested film that, like Sorrentino’s movie Youth, is knowingly indulgent of old men’s foibles. But there is one great scene in which Berlusconi, just to prove he’s still got it, cold-calls a woman out of the blue posing as a realtor and tries to sell her an apartment off-plan.
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
Since Servillo is too great an actor to settle for caricature, he undercuts his monstrous role with pangs of sympathy: the carousing has a late-life wistfulness, the breakdown of his marriage to his apparently still-beloved Veronica (Elena Sofia Ricci) rings with genuine regret.
The Observer (UK) by Wendy Ide
There’s a sloppiness and incoherence in the storytelling.