Metacritic reviews

The film ends on a slightly too simplistic, almost crass note regarding that point, but it cannot take away from its overall highly sensitive and formally rigorous exploration of nostalgia and of the other, different relationships people can afford to have with their past.

Martone’s depiction of crime is at once expressive and economic, a world of danger boiled down to pregnant pauses and minute gestures.

Normally film is considered a director’s medium, but this one belongs to cinematographer Paolo Carnera. The footage of Felice rediscovering Naples is nothing short of stunning. Martone wisely understands that he has three resources in Nostalgia that other filmmakers do not: Carnera’s eye, Favino’s acting ability to quietly emote with no wasted motion, and a city that is heartbreakingly beautiful to behold.

Mario Martone’s beautifully shot and superbly composed film teeters on the edge of something special. And if it doesn’t quite achieve that, settling in the end for something more generically crime-oriented, it’s still very good.

If yielding to nostalgia often makes people recall a more affectionate and wistful version of what actually was, this stirring, evocative film likely will leave viewers haunted by what might have been.

As the two men circle each other in the film’s second half, it shifts from contemplative drama to full-blown suspenseful thriller. It is in the latter mode that Mantone shines best as a filmmaker and Pierfrancesco Favino does as an actor.

With a formidable cast, assured direction and skillful camerawork, Nostalgia proves to be a surprisingly absorbing film.

Martone crafts a passionate, angry film that is full of atmosphere and great performances, but never fully convincing or compelling as a drama

Even in its more generic stretches, Martone’s latest feels both inviting and convincingly inhabited, a siren song to the past that confronts us with a violent, unromantic present, paved under with the same old, blood-washed cobblestones.

The feeling of nostalgia is perhaps overstressed, and the pacing is odd. But the tension created as foolish Felice drifts into a trap of his own making is magnetic.