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With his rich coming-of-age drama “The Hand of God,” Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino not only courts, but squashes comparisons to formative maestro Federico Fellini . Many viewers (and critics) will probably still compare “The Hand of God,” which Sorrentino wrote and directed, to Fellini’s “I Vitelloni” or “ Amarcord ,” and with some reason. In “The Hand of God,” Sorrentino (“ The Great Beauty ”) adapts events from his own life. His characters also often behave like the sort of charming, vulgar regional caricatures that Fellini sketched with vigorous broad strokes in his movies.

Set in Naples during the 1980s, Sorrentino’s movie follows introverted 17-year-old Fabietto Schiesi ( Filippo Scotti ) as he figures out his identity relative to his horny, embarrassing, and affectionate family members (imagine a cross between “Seduced and Abandoned” and “ A Christmas Story ”). “The Hand of God” might be Sorrentino’s least ambitious movie—its narrative is shapeless, and its characters and situations often seem familiar enough—but it’s also very accessible and over-stuffed with the sort of crass and romantic details that distinguish Sorrentino’s movies.

It’s easy to imagine that, with “The Hand of God,” Sorrentino challenged himself to make a personal, but unconventional autobiography. You might even reach this conclusion before Fabietto, in later scenes, has a characteristically unsentimental (but grandiose) heart-to-heart talk with filmmaker Antonio Capuano (a real-life mentor for Sorrentino).

"The Hand of God" also has a tip of the cap to the elusive Fellini in a few key scenes, like when older brother Marchino ( Marlon Joubert ) auditions for an unnamed Fellini film (as an extra). Sorrentino teases Marchino’s immodest ambition in a scene where Fabietto, his stand-in, waits with his brother in an office full of miserable-looking local performers. All of these would-be bit players are waiting to be recognized by the great filmmaker; Sorrentino hints at their character through their acne craters, their tan lines, and their restless body language in such an uncertain moment.

Most of “The Hand of God” concerns Fabietto’s tentative relationship with his parents Saverio and Maria ( Toni Servillo and Teresa Saponangelo ), the brightest stars in his messy family’s orbit. Sorrentino is also frequently attracted to the little family dramas that surround Fabietto’s relatives, all of whom are, despite their more ennobling moments, too stubborn or dim to be more than happy rubes.

Still, Sorrentino’s prickly, often defensive expressions of affection for his characters’ garish behavior is evident throughout comedic and/or dramatic scenes that are as vividly detailed and uncomfortably tender as Marchino and Fabietto’s pre-audition waiting room scene. That’s the lens through which Sorrentino presents Saverio and Maria. They clearly have affection for each other—and performatively whistle at each other, like love birds—even though they’re also going through a rough patch since, as we learn, Saverio’s having an affair (and it’s not a recent fling). 

Without spoiling anything: Saverio and Maria’s impact on Fabietto’s life is substantial, though it’s not immediately obvious what they mean to him. Much of “The Hand of God” is set in the space between moments, when a pregnant pause can either give way to an overheated (and only partly sensible) insight or collapse into a sullen, faraway pout. So it’s easy to see why Sorrentino loves the women in “The Hand of God,” like depressed/hysterical aunt Patrizia ( Luisa Ranieri ) or aloof/dismissive neighbor Baroness Focale ( Betty Pedrazzi ). Their appeal is obvious to us, as viewers, because their open sexuality and maternal instincts make them objects for Fabietto’s curiosity. It’s still often thrilling to watch him gravitate towards them and try to understand what about them inspires him, beyond adolescent hormones. Sorrentino’s characters are defined by their solitude and their longing; they’re beautiful, but also tacky, and often unsympathetic, beyond little (as in blink and you’ll miss it) moments of unguarded intimacy.

There’s an immersive quality to the look and sound of “The Hand of God” that suggests the ideal way to see this movie is in a theater. The squeak of an enormous bed’s springs and the judder of a slammed door ... these things have as much character as any of Fabietto’s family members, most of whom are lit with beatific chiaroscuro shading and framed with an impressive depth of field by cinematographer Daria D’Antonio.

I love the scenes in “The Hand of God” where nothing really happens, because as the Baroness explains, family members are often more complicated than they initially seem. The most drawn-out sequences in “The Hand of God” showcase Sorrentino’s knack for whimsical, but weirdly seductive drama. He still comes across like a movie brat who, despite his deep knowledge of world cinema, refuses to be bogged down with references to everybody else’s work. But “The Hand of God” feels like a Sorrentino movie because it’s about finding character in unexpected places and making it seem both true to life and completely overwhelming.

In limited theatrical release today and on Netflix on December 15th.

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Village Voice,  and elsewhere.

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The Hand of God (2021)

130 minutes

Filippo Scotti as Fabietto Schisa

Toni Servillo as Saverio Schisa

Teresa Saponangelo as Maria Schisa

Marlon Joubert as Marchino Schisa

Luisa Ranieri as Patrizia

Renato Carpentieri as Alfredo

Massimiliano Gallo as Franco

Betty Pedrazzi as Baroness Focale

• Paolo Sorrentino

Cinematographer

• Daria D'Antonio
• Cristiano Travaglioli
• Lele Marchitelli

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‘The Hand of God’ Review: A Portrait of the Cineaste as a Young Man

Paolo Sorrentino’s autobiographical drama about growing up in Naples is sensual, sad and occasionally sublime.

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By A.O. Scott

What good are movies? According to one line of thinking cited in “The Hand of God,” they are useless except as a “distraction from reality,” something we need because “reality is lousy.”

No argument here! I should note that those opinions are attributed to none other than Federico Fellini. It’s the mid-1980s, and he has come to Naples to cast his next film. We don’t see him onscreen, but his words reach the ears of Fabio Schisa (Filippo Scotti), the skinny, watchful teenager at the center of this coming-of-age story.

It’s also the story of how a young filmmaker wrests his vocation from a reality that is by turns ridiculous, enchanted, bewildering and tragic. Lousy? Perhaps, but also for Paolo Sorrentino, the writer and director, a treasury of material to work with and through. Sorrentino — who in his previous features ( “Il Divo,” “The Great Beauty” ) and television series ( “The Young Pope,” “The New Pope” ) has swooped like a curious, keen-eyed bird through the social, political and sexual thickets of modern Italy — has now turned his attention to his own past.

There are precedents, both in Italian cinema and in the work of some of Sorrentino’s contemporaries. “The Hand of God” keeps company with recent memoirish movies like Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” and Joanna Hogg’s two-part “Souvenir.” To keep it Fellini: If “The Great Beauty,” an Oscar winner in 2014, can be called Sorrentino’s “La Dolce Vita,” then this is his “Amarcord.”

But every autobiographical film is, almost by definition, a genre unto itself: a layer cake of feeling, memory, imagination and score-settling for which no recipe exists. Fabio — who usually goes by the diminutive nickname Fabietto — never meets Fellini, but late in the movie, he encounters a lesser-known Italian director named Antonio Capuano (Ciro Capano) and begs him for advice. Stripping down for a late-night swim in the Bay of Naples, Capuano harangues his would-be protégé about the importance of courage, independence and originality in the pursuit of cinema. It’s all a bit abstract and rhetorical, or it would be if this particular piece of cinema were not so visibly and palpably full of those qualities.

And much else besides. Do movies distract from the lousiness of reality or try to redeem it, alchemizing its awfulness into beauty? “The Hand of God” leans hard into the second possibility, a tendency it shares with Sorrentino’s other work. However sordid, sad or grotesque the raw material — addiction and Mafia violence ( “The Consequences of Love” ), rock-star middle age ( “This Must Be the Place” ), Silvio Berlusconi ( “Loro” ) — he is a compulsive, unabashed aestheticizer.

“The Hand of God” begins with a ravishing aerial view of Naples, backlit by sunrise. The next shot is of a noisy, angry nighttime traffic jam, but this too becomes an occasion for delectation, as a beautiful woman steps out of a bus queue to speak with a gray-bearded gentleman in an antique car.

The man (Enzo Decaro) may or may not be who he says he is — San Gennaro, the city’s patron saint — but the woman is absolutely Fabietto’s Aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri). Her nephew regards her with an unsteady, adolescent mixture of lust and compassion. The movie shares his sentiments.

The extended family they occupy is a noisy, caustic, sometimes violent clan. A genealogical chart is not supplied: The audience is tossed into the domestic scrum like a new spouse or a country cousin, to make sense of things as they happen. We are invited to a sprawling luncheon full of bad manners, brutal teasing and useless advice. Aunt Patrizia stretches out naked on the deck of a boat. A foul-tempered matriarch in a fur coat bites into a ball of mozzarella as if it were the apple in the Garden of Eden.

Given this background, how could Fabietto not grow up to make movies? His nuclear family is equally chaotic, though less garishly dysfunctional than some of the collateral branches. His mother, Maria (the wonderful Teresa Saponangelo), is adept at juggling oranges and playing pranks. (One of them involves another Italian cinematic notable, Franco Zeffirelli, whose assistant Maria impersonates on the phone.) Her husband, Saverio (Toni Servillo, a fixture of the Sorrentino cinematic universe), works at the Bank of Naples, though he proudly calls himself a communist. As a matter of ideological principle, he refuses to buy a television with a remote control.

Fabietto’s brother, Marchino (Marlon Joubert), is an aspiring actor until an audition with Fellini, who finds his face “too conventional.” Sorrentino shares Fellini’s taste for odd, sometimes grotesque human faces and physiques. His most Felliniesque quality, though, may be his commitment to emotional anarchy. Feelings don’t come in neat packages or move in straight lines. Anguish and amusement are neighbors, sometimes even synonyms. Delight swerves into pain. Sarcasm gives way suddenly to earnest sentiment.

The disharmony in the Schisa household is comically banal — an all-but-unseen sister monopolizes the bathroom; an aristocratic landlady bangs on the ceiling with a broom — until Saverio’s infidelity cranks it up to melodrama. And then, almost exactly halfway through the film, something terrible happens, a hammer-blow of fate that transforms the family, Fabietto and “The Hand of God” itself.

The title, by the way, refers not to theology but to the history of soccer. When Sorrentino’s Neapolitans are not bickering, gossiping or ogling one another, they are consumed with the question of whether the great Argentine midfielder Diego Maradona will come play for the city’s team. When he does, it seems like a miracle, and glimpses of him on the field or on television are like small eruptions of magic — especially the notorious hand-assisted goal in the 1986 World Cup that Maradona attributed to divine intervention.

Fabietto is less a fairy-tale prince than an apprentice sorcerer. Scotti, graceful and alert, is a quiet presence but not a passive one. The shift in Fabietto’s perspective from no-longer-boy to almost-man is the subtlest achievement in a film that isn’t much interested in subtlety.

A lot happens to him, some of it what you would expect from a movie about growing up. He makes a new friend (a smuggler named Armando, played with down-to-earth mischief by Biagio Manna). He loses his virginity. His experiences may be, to some degree, conventional, but Sorrentino refuses to treat anything as ordinary. His compositions are lush, sensual and strange. (The images are captured by the cinematographer Daria D’Antonio.) At times, it can seem like too much. At times, it is too much!

But I wouldn’t say that this movie is a distraction from reality, any more than I would call it a work of realism. It’s a beautiful tautology: a true-to-life movie about a life made for movies.

The Hand of God Rated R. Aunt Patrizia. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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With The Hand of God , Paolo Sorrentino Gets Achingly Personal

In soccer lore, the “hand of God” refers to Diego Maradona’s legendary first goal against England in the 1986 World Cup quarterfinals, a shot he practically punched into the net. The illegal hand ball went unseen by the refs in a game Argentina took 2-1, on its way to winning the world championship one week later. The English were understandably salty about it for years, even though Maradona was the undisputed greatest player in the world at the time and Argentina clearly the better team. To some Argentines, the victory over England, coming not so long after their country’s defeat in the Falklands War of 1982, had some deeper resonance. Maybe it was revenge, or maybe it was just a necessary balancing of the books.

The title of Paolo Sorrentino’s achingly autobiographical coming-of-age film The Hand of God refers not just to Maradona’s goal but also to a shattering tragedy that the director endured as a teen, and which occurs almost exactly halfway through this perplexing, lovely movie. The event in question actually has its own rather surprising Maradona connection. (I won’t give either the tragedy or its soccer connection away, even though plenty of articles about the picture have mentioned the rather ghastly thing that the film is about.) In other words, in Sorrentino’s vision, too, the “hand of God” is not a random act of divine Providence or damnation, but an offsetting, a counterbalance. Through unspeakable sorrow, the director seems to suggest, he wound up becoming a man and an artist.

Sorrentino’s stand-in is Neapolitan teen Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti), who is growing up in the 1980s with little but girls and soccer on his mind. He’s excited by the rumors that Maradona might be on the verge of signing with the local team, SSC Napoli. And he’s also enchanted by his voluptuous aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri), who is grappling with both mental illness and an abusive shithead husband. To be fair, everybody in the family seems to lust for Patrizia. When the whole clan gets together for a summer gathering and she takes her clothes off to tan, all the menfolk sit transfixed.

The early scenes of The Hand of God are disjointed in the way family chronicles tend to be. We meet Fabietto’s oddball parents: Dad (played by Sorrentino regular Toni Servillo, possibly the greatest actor of his generation) is a devout communist who also happens to work at a bank; he’s deeply in love with Fabietto’s mother (Teresa Saponangelo) but has evidently also been cheating on her for years. Mom, on the other hand, is alternately sensible and ruthless; she’ll help a family member in need at the drop of a hat, but she’ll also play the cruelest of pranks on those around her. We meet Fabietto’s older brother Marchino (Marlon Joubert), an aspiring actor who auditions for bit parts in Fellini films but can never get a gig because he’s uninterestingly handsome and has no real drive. (“It’s called persistence,” he tells Fabietto one day, as they watch Maradona patiently knock shot after shot at practice. “And I’ll never have it.”) Their sister, in a surreal running gag throughout the movie, never leaves the bathroom.

There is in fact a general sense of stasis throughout the house — through the whole extended family — as if we’re watching a moment captured in time and then stretched across the years. The family has rented a VHS of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America from the video store, but they never manage to watch it. Maradona came to Napoli in 1984; he scored the “hand of God” goal in 1986; Napoli won its first championship with him in 1987 — all moments glimpsed in the film, even though Fabietto the teen (or anyone else, for that matter) never really seems to age. Isn’t that how memory works, anyway?

In the style of his great hero, Fellini, Sorrentino plays up the surrealism and the grotesquerie, whether he’s depicting the neighbors in Fabietto’s apartment building or his own family. He’s unafraid to show his loved ones being petty, or cruel, or crazy, or judgmental, and the overall effect — fond remembrance of people being deeply shitty to each other — feels startling and true. The director doesn’t try to sugarcoat or sanitize these years. This is who they were , he seems to be saying, and I loved them . Throughout the episodic, diffuse first half, Sorrentino also plants little narrative elements that he pays off in the second half, be it a nasty rumor, a magical vision, or the missing battery from an elderly relative’s electrolarynx.

With previous films like the Oscar-winning Great Beauty and the politically charged biopics Il Divo and Loro , Sorrentino indulged his fondness for boisterous, bunga-bunga stylization. He is contemporary cinema’s mad poet of unchecked hedonism. But he holds himself back this time around. The Hand of God isn’t realistic or gritty (or, God forbid, subtle ), but it is more subdued. Not because the director is telling a more personal story, but because he’s trying to get us to notice something almost inexpressible — the weird, gathering sense that the world, for all its horrors, is a marvel worth exploring and revealing. There’s a moment in the second half when Fabietto takes a ride on the back of a friend’s scooter one night, and they drive down to a pier. Our hero looks up at the darkened sky, the city twinkling around them, the shimmering sea, and remarks that he’s never realized Naples could be so beautiful. It’s this feeling of melancholy liberation, of not just beauty but the crucial role that beauty plays in saving our broken lives, that Sorrentino captures in his captivating film.

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‘The Hand of God’ Review: Paolo Sorrentino Gets Caught Between Nostalgia and Overstatement in His 1980s Coming-of-Age Memory Play

The Italian filmmaker depicts his defining teenage moment in Naples in 1984, but with a tone that's less Fellini than flip.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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Fabietto (Filippo Scotti), the autobiographical hero of Paolo Sorrentino ’s “ The Hand of God ,” is a teenager growing up in the 1980s in the bustling port metropolis of Naples, and he keeps a watchful gaze on just about everything. He’s like the eye at the center of a storm of avidly impassioned but overstated filmmaking. Filippo Scotti, the actor who plays him, is handsome in a pale way, with curly hair and a presence that’s elegant in its quietude. There’s something Chalamet-esque about him; at the same time, you could imagine him playing the young Bob Dylan. The year is 1984, and Fabietto is a kid who knows how to fit in but still sets himself apart. He wears a small hoop earring (not so common back then), and he’s got a Walkman whose earphones are always draped around his neck. In the cracked asphalt field at school, the boys playing football come off, in comparison, like rambunctious zombies. Yet Fabietto, in his way, is as much of a sports fiend as they are. There are rumors that Diego Maradona , the Argentine football superstar, is about to join the Naples team (the rumors turn out to be true), and for Fabietto, like everyone else in Naples, it’s as if Jesus himself were about to arrive.

As you watch “The Hand of God,” it’s easy to vibrate sympathetically with Fabietto, because he’s got a sly, pensive curiosity that you can tell will take him places. For most of the movie, however, the places he goes tend to involve his extended family, as well as the occasional scoundrel he hooks up with in town. And while it’s easy to feel that Sorrentino is pulling what you see directly out of his diary (the action is loose, quirky, anecdotal), you wish that he’d portrayed the other characters as he does his surrogate hero. Most of them are presented in a way that’s raucous and overly broad — like, for instance, Fabietto’s embattled Aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri), a beauty who flirts with him, or her husband, Franco (Massimilliano Gallo), who’s convinced that she’s a “whore” and responds by screaming at her and beating her up, even though she makes it clear that all she really wants is to have a child. It’s not that this kind of abuse isn’t “real.” It’s that the movie shoves it in your face, so that it’s less than convincing. At a get-together in the country, the relatives berate each other with the glib high-volume toxicity of characters out of a bad Lina Wertmüller film.

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In an interview with Variety , Sorrentino confesses that before he made “The Hand of God,” “I think I had overdone it with some films that were too built, that were a bit overwrought.” I agree, but you have to wonder if he’ll be saying the same thing about this one in 10 years. “The Hand of God” has some good scenes, but it’s the kind of portrait-of-an-artist drama where you watch the insults, the clashes, the assaultive attitude of it all and you think: Is this what it was actually like for the young Sorrentino growing up in Naples? Or does he simply have an aversion to scenes that don’t hit you over the head?

The scenes with Fabietto’s parents strike a more compelling note. His father, Saverio (Toni Servillo), is an ebullient older chap who works in a bank but still considers himself a Communist. The family lives in a modest apartment complex, where Fabietto and his older brother, Marchino (Marlon Joubert), share a dingy bedroom, and where the family gathers around a small TV set that Saverio changes the channels of by poking it with a stick (he’s too much of a Communist to buy a remote). Fabietto’s mother, Maria (Teresa Saponangelo), loves to stage practical jokes, and she and Saverio seem quite lovey-dovey, until it’s revealed that he has a long-term mistress, at which point Maria fills the apartment with screams of agony, which sets Fabietto to shaking so badly that he seems on the verge of a seizure. Once again: High drama…or dramatic hyperbole? Maybe both.

Watching “The Hand of God,” it’s hard not be reminded of a certain other autobiographical drama by an Italian filmmaker: Fellini’s “Amarcord” (1973). That movie, for all its wistful dream-time nostalgia, had its own rather broad side (I adored it when I was 16, which may be just the right age for it), and a male-gaze lustiness that Sorrentino echoes, notably in the scene where Fabietto finally loses his virginity. It’s with a character we would have least expected him to do that with — and there’s something bracing about it, because the actress, Betti Pedrazzi, is superb, and it has the feel of a true experience. There are other moments with that quality, like the one where Maria says of Marchino, “We’ve lost him” (because he’s got a girlfriend now), and we see the sadness with which she’s watching her sons grow up.

Fellini is actually in this movie (or, at least, his voice). Machino, an aspiring actor, goes to audition for a new Fellini film (in the waiting room, everyone is dressed like their idea of a Fellini extra), only to be told by the maestro that he looks like a waiter. But just the momentary proximity to Fellini lights a spark in Fabietto. He decides that he wants to become a film director, a desire enhanced when he watches the shooting of a movie in the middle of town. Yet it’s an odd thing: We know, of course, that Paolo Sorrentino did go on to become a filmmaker, but nothing in Fabietto’s presence suggests that he’s got a jones for cinema, or even what it is about being a director that attracts him. That Sorrentino bungles this is a serious sign of his limitations as a screenwriter.

The central incident in “The Hand of God,” which I won’t reveal, is the sudden tragedy that came to define Sorrentino’s youth. It’s quite a shock to experience, and Sorrentino infuses a scene at the hospital with a lacerating raw power. It’s one of a number of moments where you feel like you can glimpse the richer, better, subtler movie that’s struggling to get out from the soulful but too often hamhanded one that “The Hand of God” is.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (In Competition), Sept. 2, 2021. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 129 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release of a The Apartment production. Producers: Lorenzo Mieli, Paolo Sorrentino. Executive producers: Riccardo Neri.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Paolo Sorrentino. Camera: Daria D’Antonio. Editor: Cristiano Travaglioli. Music: Lele Marchitelli.
• With: Filippo Scotti, Toni Servillo, Teresa Saponangelo, Marlon Joubert, Luisa Ranieri, Betty Pedrazzi, Massimiliano Gallo, Ciro Capano.

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‘The Hand of God’ Review: Paolo Sorrentino’s Most Personal Movie Is Also His Best

David ehrlich.

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It would be accurate to say that Paolo Sorrentino ’s work explores the relationship between the sacred and the profane, but such tepid wording fails to capture the orgiastic maximalism of “ The Great Beauty ,” speak to the sexed up sacrilege of “The New Pope,” or summon the I didn’t even see it because a Sorrentino movie about Silvio Berlusconi just sounded way too exhausting -ness of “Loro.” Calling “Il Divo” a film about a crooked politician would be like calling “8 ½” a film about writer’s block: Right enough, and yet oh so wrong. In Sorrentino’s world, the sacred and the profane don’t just rub together or intertwine so much as they dry hump each other — with eternal vigor — until we so lose track of where one ends and the other begins that we stop trying to figure it out. For better or worse, his cinema is the work of someone who knows that life isn’t neatly divided into the holy and the heretical, miracles and tragedies.

Now, Sorrentino revisits the summer when he learned that lesson the hard way, as the famed stylist churns his memories into a soberingly autobiographical coming-of-age story about a Neopolitan teenager whose entire world is lost and redeemed in almost the same breath. Appropriately erratic and transcendent in equal measure, “ The Hand of God ” might be shot with uncharacteristic restraint by Sorrentino’s baroque standards, but its relative calm allows him to crystallize a truth that was sometimes lost amid the chaos of his more circus-like epics: Heaven and hell are very real places that co-exist right here on Earth, often on top of and inside each other so completely that people can lose sight of where they are if they forget to close their eyes and imagine they’re somewhere else.

Naples in the 1980s: It was the best of times for Sorrentino, and it was the worst of times. And so it shall be for his young stand-in Fabietto Schisa (newcomer Filippo Scotti), who naturally lacks the ability to see either of them heading toward him. Like too many of the main characters in coming-of-age stories — even the autobiographical ones — the gawky and introverted Fabietto is something of a blank slate; unformed in a way that comes off as underwritten. That’s all the more striking in a film this boisterous and full of life, but also easier to forgive.

“The Hand of God” certainly doesn’t lack for characters that hold your attention. The first and most tragic of them is Fabietto’s infertile aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri), a buxom Sophia Loren type who’s introduced in a haunted prologue that anticipates the funereal horniness of the film to come. Desperate to bear her abusive husband a child, Patrizia seeks out the ghost of San Gennaro in the hope that a smack on the ass from a dead saint might be enough to heal her womb (the material presence of such myths will later give way to the waking dreams of cinema itself, beginning with the “Once Upon a Time in America” VHS that takes permanent residence atop the Schisa family TV).

Stranger things have happened, and several of them will over the course of that summer: Fabietto’s matinee idol brother Marchino (Marlon Joubert) will land a screen test for a new Fellini movie, and his sister Daniela will almost literally never come out of the bathroom. A cigarette smuggler will become his first real friend, and a neighbor will become the last person he would’ve picked to take his virginity. None of these people will know what to make of it when Mario — a mustached imbecile prone to wearing a red shirt under his blue overalls — starts drawing penises on every surface of the neighborhood. Like so many of the carnivalesque flourishes that form the soul of this movie, it’s the kind of detail that feels at once both unreal and vividly remembered.

But nothing, it seems, could possibly come as more of a shock to Fabietto than the news that Barcelona mega-star Diego Maradona — who the very subjective opening credits refer to as “the best soccer player of all time” — is taking his talents to Naples. Only in a story where fantasy infringes upon reality like a film shoot on a public street and saints walk among us just waiting to cop a feel could a mythic figure like Maradona just show up out of the blue one day.

It’s so outlandish that it could be one of the pranks Fabietto’s mom (Teresa Saponangelo) plays on the woman across the hall during the funny, anarchic family scenes that find the first half of “The Hand of God” as indebted to “Amarcord” as the second is to “I Vitteloni.” Even Fabietto’s happy-go-lucky communist father (Sorrentino mainstay Toni Servillo , the sweetness) can’t believe this good fortune. But the Schisas’ blessings turn out to be decidedly mixed. In a turn of events true to Sorrentino’s life, Fabietto opts to watch Maradona work his magic at the local stadium rather than spend a weekend with his parents at their vacation home, where they both die from a carbon monoxide leak. Euphoria and tragedy running on parallel tracks.

Fellini says, “Cinema is a distraction from reality, which is lousy.” But Sorrentino doesn’t seem so sure, even as his young avatar gravitates towards the movies in the wake of the lousiest thing that has ever happened to him. Perhaps — Fabietto begins to wonder after witnessing first-hand how these two dimensions overlap — cinema can represent a broadening of reality. Not just an escape from the pain that will haunt him for the rest of his life, but also a way to savor the pleasure that’s been displaced to the margins. If heaven and hell can occupy the same space, why not materiality and imagination?

Even (and sometimes especially) at its most inconsolable, “The Hand of God” holds fast to the idea that Fabietto may not be able to change the world, but the right lens may be able to change how he looks at it. Consider the scene where Fabietto has sex with a (much) older woman who encourages him to pretend that he’s sleeping with someone else. “You have to imagine the show,” she tells him, “because you can’t change the channel now.”

Sorrentino’s grip strengthens as the film grows more surreal, a trend that peaks with a subplot in which Fabietto befriends Sorrentino’s mentor, the fiery director Antonio Capuano. Listening to this know-nothing twerp bemoan Naples as a place where nothing happens, Capuano snaps back: “Do you know how many stories there are in this city!?”

He doesn’t then, but eventually he will come to realize that his aunt sunbathing nude on the deck of the family boat was a story, and “the meanest woman in Naples” eating chunks of mozzarella with her bare hand was a story, and his parents whistling their love to each other even while their marriage rotted from the core was a story too.

“The Hand of God” doesn’t always find the clearest way of knotting these various stories together, and the film’s second half — replete with so many highs — also feels like it leaves a number of important characters dangling in the wind. Even the gentle final shot, which crystallizes so much of the movie’s wistful promise, doesn’t allow the film to resolve so much as it guarantees that it will do so one day in the distant future. “I want an imaginary life,” Fabietto declares some time after his parents’ death, “just like the one I had before.” By the time this tremblingly personal movie comes to an end, Sorrentino has shown us how he made that life into his reality.

“The Hand of God” premiered at the 2021 Venice Film Festival . It will be available to stream on Netflix starting Wednesday, December 15.

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The Hand of God Reviews

Sorrentino uses the coming-of-age genre to turn his own personal tragedy into a beguiling fable of family and creativity lost and found.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2024

The Hand of God is a love letter to Italy and for Sorrentino, it becomes a form of escapism and a humane portrayal of a grief-stricken teenager as he enters a new world.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

[Sorrentino] has crafted a story even more personal within his canon, perhaps the most intimate and honest. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Sep 13, 2022

Sure, it's a visually beautiful journey through a nostalgic world, but the tonal and narrative shifts prove to be inorganic and forced.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jul 11, 2022

As existentialist as 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963), as personal as Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018) ... and technically spectacular. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jun 28, 2022

A marvelous result…nostalgic, and luminous. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 85/100 | May 12, 2022

Is hope enough to tell a story? Or pain? Knowing ourselves is only enough when you let other people know themselves by what you have to say. The Hand of God is an absolute masterpiece that reminded me of who I am. Full review in Spanish

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Apr 7, 2022

Once again it feels like Sorrentino's sensibility is too easy and sentimental to get the movie where it so clearly wants to go.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 11, 2022

More than just a pretty European art film, The Hand of God is a sensitive memoir that possesses all the beauty and pain of the best memories.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 3, 2022

Revisiting and amplifying the impressions of his youth in the first half allow him to present a charged spectrum of lifes fullness, but in the second part he appears constrained by the material and uncertain how to reflect on his psychological state.

Full Review | Feb 26, 2022

Dreadful. This movie is a dog. Dogdamn it.

Full Review | Original Score: ZERO STARS | Feb 20, 2022

"Filmmaker Paul Sorrentino's poignant, intensely personal coming-of-age story, set i Naples in the 1980."

Full Review | Original Score: 7/0 | Feb 19, 2022

"'The Hand of God' feels like a companion piece to Sorrentino's outstanding 2015 film 'Youth'... both productions explore themes of female madness and how alluring women affect the closest men in their lives..."

Full Review | Feb 18, 2022

Dazzling images and intimate storytelling converge in Sorrentino's most personal film. One where cinema not only mimics reality, but offers redemption. Full Review in Spanish

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 12, 2022

Sorrentino harmonizes humor with tragedy through the coming-of-age story of Fabietto, a young man with a passion for soccer star Diego Maradona and filmmaker Federico Fellini. A delicate tale that is splendidly shot and cleverly told.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Feb 11, 2022

For a long time, the movie meanders maddeningly, and, like Fellini, Sorrentino seems to have an unsettling taste for the grotesque, but things snap into focus when tragedy strikes, and we wind up with a vivid and loving portrait that stays with us.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 22, 2022

Sorrentino is more successful in the scenes about family life. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jan 19, 2022

Paolo Sorrentino's direction is perfect. His cinematographer, Daria D'Antonio, has captured Naples beautifully. The film focuses on a tight-knit family, but in its telling, it plays out like an epic.

Full Review | Jan 14, 2022

Despite its over-familiar set-ups, Sorrentino's film, based loosely on his own experiences growing up in the city of Naples in the 1980s, is an attention-grabber.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 6, 2022

The Hand of Godis filled with the kind of detail that could only have come from observation-and memory. That one family could contain so many unique and peculiar people is a reminder that truth is almost always stranger than fiction.

Full Review | Jan 6, 2022

Review: Paolo Sorrentino reflects on his turbulent Naples youth in uneven ‘The Hand of God’

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The sunny, wondrous, hidden Naples of Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God” is a place where this maximalist Italian filmmaker (the Oscar-winning “The Great Beauty,” “Loro” ) has no institutional hedonists and wealthy grotesques to mine — no politicians, popes or party animals — for further displays of lavish decadence. That’s because this episodic seaside movie is a dream of Sorrentino’s modest youth, from a time when one was somehow formless and fixated and life was a case of always being in a state of “what’s next?” without necessarily believing you could do anything about it.

Coming-of-age movies can be about the One Lesson or the many. Sorrentino, however, would prefer you take in the ‘80s-era journey of distracted adolescent Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti), a scrawny kid in a big family, as a gliding, swerving travelogue of humor and heartache, visions and sounds, minus any overriding moral instruction in how anyone is supposed to grow up. Partly that’s due to Sorrentino having a notoriously wandering sensibility about What It All Means — image reigns, stimulation rules, story can wait. But it’s also a reflection of how fate works on the mind of one looking back at defining incidents and essential figures. Details do more for him in painting the picture than adhering to a prism of reason.

When we meet Fabietto, he’s in the grip of two preoccupations: Argentinean soccer phenom Diego Maradona, whose pending decision about playing for Napoli has the whole city on edge, and his sexually arousing, possibly unstable aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri), who likes to sunbathe naked in front of the whole extended, eccentric and wildly judgmental-of-each-other Schisa clan. Sports, lust and nutty, volatile relatives are more real to Fabietto and his older brother Marchino (Marlon Joubert) than anything else, save the occasional turbulence in the loving, laugh-filled marriage of their parents, Maria — a terrific Teresa Saponangelo — and Saverio, buoyantly realized by regular Sorrentino star Toni Servillo.

The first hour’s parade of oddballs and exaggerated vignettes under the bright Neapolitan pop of Daria D’Antonio’s cinematography can be broad to a fault, but there’s an honest perspective at work about what lands in an awkward boy’s memory. (It’s usually what’s colorful, sexy, weird or mean.) These scenes are ultimately meant to be a “before,” anyway, standing in stark contrast to the second half’s darker shades, after we learn the heart-rending circumstances that make this an especially personal lookback for Sorrentino.

Paolo Sorrentino’s ‘Hand of God’ is about family -- and the future for young people

The director recalls the joy of his youth filled with extended family -- along with the pain.

Nov. 30, 2021

The movie then slows down to give a shattered Fabietto room to experience everything around him anew, which is when his interest in cinema becomes more than watching his wannabe-actor brother audition for Fellini’s new film, or his mother invoke Franco Zeffirelli to prank a haughty neighbor. The Sorrentino we know doesn’t entirely go away, of course: When one fixture from Fabietto’s life — a neighbor Baroness (Betti Pedrazzi) — sees fit to help him “look to the future,” it memorably illustrates the director’s penchant for scenarios simultaneously bizarre and tender.

The rest of “The Hand of God” loses something, though, as a sobering maturity takes hold and new, disparate figures in Fabietto’s life — a friendly smuggler, a beautiful actress, a director mentor — prove less interesting than the offbeat but tight-knit family dynamics that grounded the first half (and diverted us from Scotti’s not exactly commanding lead performance). It’s also when the lack of sharpness to Sorrentino’s vision of youth’s turbulence and epiphanies becomes problematic, as if we’re merely thumbing through his past for consequential bits and pieces.

It’s a good title, though, for this uneven, occasionally dazzling personal journey. “The Hand of God” refers to how Maradona — Sorrentino’s idolized metaphor for talent, grit, magic and persistence — mischievously explained away a legendary goal of his that was later determined by replay to have grazed his hand. Sorrentino clearly sees his cinema the same way: better enjoyed than examined, maybe fouled, hopefully touched, ever beautiful.

'The Hand of God'

In Italian with English subtitles Rated: R, for sexual content, language, some graphic nudity and brief drug use Running time: 2 hours, 9 minutes Playing: Starts Dec. 3, The Landmark, West L.A.; Bay Theatre, Pacific Palisades; Los Feliz Theatre; available Dec. 15 on Netflix

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The Hand of God review: A messy, vibrant coming-of-age from Oscar-winning Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino

Everything comes oversized in The Hand of God : the colors, the characters, the gestures. Even its bared nipples (a recurring motif, if you will) loom larger than life. That's probably because the boisterous, big-hearted latest from Oscar-winning Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino ( The Great Beauty ) is centered on a teenage boy — a stand-in for Sorrentino's own youth in 1980s Naples — though the unassuming Fabietto (Chalamet doppelganger Filippo Scotti) often feels less like the star than a linchpin in a narrative that swings freely between comedy and tragedy, melodrama and memory play.

It's 1984, and Fabie lives with his mother and father and two older siblings in a comfortably cluttered apartment, dreaming of the things most kids his age do: sex, soccer, freedom. His parents are still crazy about each other, even if Saverio (Toni Servillo) can't stay faithful, much to the distress of Maria (Teresa Saponangelo). His affable brother, Marchino (Marlon Joubert) takes him along on acting auditions and sympathizes with his crush on their emotionally troubled aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri), who looks like Venus on the half shell and whose naked sexuality turns even a family lunch into an erotic revelation.

Her penchant for defiant public nudity aside, Fabie and the furious, vulnerable Patrizia begin to form their own kind of tentative friendship. But even more than forbidden relatives, Fabie has a passion for European football, and the prospect that real-life Argentinian superstar Diego Maradona may join Naples' team is almost more excitement than he can stand. (The film's title comes from a legendary World Cup goal once scored by Maradona.) That, and his discovery that he wants to direct his own movies when he grows up, keep him anxiously afloat, until a sudden loss — which would seem like cruel screenwriting if it hadn't actually happened in Sorrentino's own life — upends everything.

There's more than a touch of magical realism in God , with its absurdist set pieces and saturated Technicolor tableaux; a fictionalized brush with Frederico Fellini at an audition feels less like a cameo than a visit from the movie's spirit guide, the benevolent blessing of a maestro. (Though his lone contribution on screen is a brusque dismissal of Marchino's acting prospects.) The movie's tone shifts don't always sit easy; farce and calamity are strange bedfellows, and the episodic plot often doesn't so much connect the dots as let them scatter whimsically across the film's two-hour-plus runtime. There are more cohesive coming-of-age movies to be sure, and subtler ones. But God doesn't really try too hard to make it all make sense; it's just one boy's dolce vita, drenched in Mediterranean sun, hormones, and salt air. Grade: B+

The Hand of God is in limited theaters today and on Netflix Dec. 15.

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clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

Sports, sex and cinema are the focus of a young man’s world in the film memoir ‘The Hand of God’

Paolo Sorrentino (“Il Divo,” “The Great Beauty”) mines a deep vein of personal memory in “The Hand of God,” a semi-autobiographical film about a young man coming of age in 1980s Naples.

Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti) is 17, almost friendless, obsessed with soccer and living mostly happily with his parents, brother and sister in a comfortable apartment when the rumors begin to percolate: Diego Maradona, the Argentine soccer legend, might be moving to Naples, thereby resurrecting the beleaguered local team. Like everyone in the southern Italian city, Fabie is caught up in Maradona fever, his desire for the sport star’s imprimatur commingling with his own sensual awakening and intimations of what life may have in store for him.

Those stirrings — sports, sex and cinema; filial loyalty; familial separation; a fledgling’s tentative sense of self — are what propel “The Hand of God,” which soccer fans will recognize as a nod to Maradona’s famous goal during the 1986 World Cup match, in which his hand fouled the ball, unobserved by referees. (“A little with the head of Maradona, a little with the hand of God,” he quipped afterward.) The title also refers to the fickle and, at a critical juncture, cruel twists of fate that condition Fabie’s life.

Because so many of those moments tack closely to Sorrentino’s own experience, audiences might expect “The Hand of God” to be a visceral, immersive plunge into sense memory. There are vivid moments, to be sure, especially when Fabie is spending time with his raucous extended family, a teasing, chattering conglomeration of Epicureans, good sports, comedians and ne’er-do-wells. The most appealing of the lot is Fabie’s mother Mari, whose juggling talent and penchant for practical jokes make her the life of the party — until the latter goes a little too far. Touchingly portrayed by Teresa Saponangelo, Mari shares a warm, companionable relationship with Fabie’s father Saverio (Sorrentino rep player Toni Servillo), but even the whistles they share as a secret language turn out to be hiding a secret that will shock Fabie in time.

Best known for his extravagant visuals and production values, Sorrentino simplifies his style for “The Hand of God,” in which he favors long, languid takes and pacing that, by the second half of the film, feels less poetic than tedious. Structured as a series of pungent episodes, the story keeps everyone at arm’s length, including Fabie himself. Although he shares a bedroom with his brother Marchino (Marlon Joubert), we never see their sister Daniela, who is constantly sequestered in the bathroom — clearly meant as a joke, but one that gets more tiresome as Fabie ambles along his somewhat aimless path.

That path, inevitable, includes movies, which figure prominently in “The Hand of God,” from a casting session of eccentrics and oddballs for Fellini’s latest film to an anecdote involving Franco Zeffirelli. It’s telling that Fabie’s first inkling of what it means to be a director comes when he observes Fellini culling the head shots of pretty actresses It’s been said that cinema is an art form predicated on men watching beautiful women, an ethos Sorrentino uncritically takes to heart. “Looking is all I know how to do,” Fabie tells the filmmaker Antonio Capuano (Ciro Carpano), Sorrentino’s real-life mentor, here depicted as an arrogant, histrionic auteur.

In the course of the overlong, overindulgent “Hand of God,” it sometimes seems that looking is still what Sorrentino does best: He has an instinctive, often exacting eye, but not necessarily a kind one, such as when he stages an early scene involving Fabie’s voluptuous aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri) with a breast vulnerably — and, for him, erotically — exposed.

While Sorrentino assembles his players over the first hour of “The Hand of God,” things seem to be building to a promising conclusion; the turning point, when it comes, is appropriately shocking. But over the next hour, the encounters and coincidences that clearly mean so much to him simply happen — they don’t land with palpable impact. The film loses momentum and the specifics of the filmmaker’s youthful longing, grief and self-discovery feel solipsistic rather than universal. For all its beauty and poignancy, “The Hand of God” suffers from a strange paradox: It goes on too long but somehow doesn’t go far enough.

R.  At Landmark’s E Street Cinema; available Dec. 15 on Netflix. Contains sexual material, strong language, some graphic nudity and brief drug use. In Italian with subtitles. 130 minutes.

The Hand Of God Review

03 Dec 2021

The Hand Of God

There’s an explosion of colour in The Hand Of God , director Paolo Sorrentino ’s brazenly autobiographical love letter to the Italy of his youth, and a reckoning with the childhood experiences that changed his life. There’s an adorable breeziness to the first half, where everything is bright and everyone is fabulous, where Italy is to die for, and where familial banter takes no prisoners. Hormonal teenage boy Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti) serves as Sorrentino’s fictional avatar, navigating this beguiling eco-system, and it’s an idiosyncratic, idyllic coming-of-age, to some extent recalling Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty . For quite some time, not much happens, and doesn’t need to: life just drifts by, and it’s a pleasure to behold, Sorrentino in love with everybody’s faces, and flooding it all with romantic, rose-tinted glasses.

Or does he? There are cracks. Some of these people are damaged, and some less obviously than others. More so as the years pass. There is failure and disappointment and weariness. “Don’t look at me,” says an older lady. “There’s nothing to see.” Then, around halfway through, paradise is punctured, as tragedy invades the bliss, and Fabietto, thrown a crippling curveball, must grow up quickly. From there, the colour dials down and things change course, as he learns some life lessons from an eclectic, eccentric parade of unlikely role models who hand down their own experiences to this curious and malleable kid.

This is Sorrentino’s Roma , to some degree a portrait of the artist as a young man, but also a picture-perfect take on a time and a place. By the end, you do feel like you’ve got to know 1980s Naples, got to feel it, smell it, taste it, and you certainly get to know the adolescent Sorrentino, on the way to finding himself. At one point, Federico Fellini is in town making a film, and someone overhears him saying that cinema means nothing, that it’s just a distraction. That is patently untrue. In moments, The Hand Of God is simultaneously absurd and profound. Considering what goes down, it’s not the emotional hitter it might like to be, but there’s no doubting the huge, broken heart driving it all.

Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – The Hand of God (2021)

December 16, 2021 by Tom Beasley

The Hand of God , 2021.

Directed by Paolo Sorrentino. Starring Filippo Scotti, Luisa Ranieri, Toni Servillo, Teresa Saponangelo, Massimiliano Gallo, Renato Carpentieri, Marlon Joubert and Betti Pedrazzi.

An aspiring filmmaker in Naples must navigate sex, coming of age and tragedy against the backdrop of Diego Maradona’s much-heralded arrival in the city.

Football has immense power to unite communities, as well as divide them. While this year’s Euro 2020 final may be remembered for the horrific scenes of flare-meets-arse-based carnage in Leicester Square and utter yobbery on Wembley Way, it’s also worth recalling how exciting those few weeks felt as an England fan. Footballing success galvanises community spirit and provides disparate social groups and people with a shared devotion.

This is made clear during a key scene in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God , when Diego Maradona punches in the infamous, titular goal at the 1986 World Cup. The film’s characters are watching the match on their Neapolitan balconies and leap around in celebration, as if Maradona were sending Italy into the semi-finals rather than Argentina. “It’s a political act, a revolution,” exclaims one character while others just marvel at the sheer audacity of what Naples’ adopted son has pulled off on the sport’s biggest stage. Everyone has a different take on what it all means, but their awestruck reactions are as one.

Indeed, football’s unique unifying force sits as a constant sizzle beneath Sorrentino’s deeply personal film, which is partially inspired by his own life – including a very painful tragedy mirrored on screen in brutally real fashion. The analogue for Sorrentino is the Chalamet-a-like Fabietto (Filippo Scotti), who is obsessed with two things – the prospect of Maradona signing for Napoli and his aunt Patrizia’s (Luisa Ranieri) penchant for public nudity. His parents (Toni Servillo and Teresa Saponangelo), meanwhile, are in the midst of heated rows over Servillo’s character’s long-standing affair.

The Hand of God is a difficult movie to love, unravelling as a shapeless and ill-disciplined meander through the protagonist’s life. By never settling on a clear central thread, the film makes it difficult to connect with on an emotional level – especially as Fabietto is never much more than a tactiturn blank canvas. We know he idolises Maradona, but we don’t know what impact that has on him or why he suddenly decides that he wants to pursue a career as a filmmaker. Certainly, beyond the recurring image of a rented Once Upon a Time in America videotape, cinema doesn’t seem to play a big part in his life.

In fact, the best moments of The Hand of God are the small family details – the way Saponangelo’s lively, devilish character plays elaborate pranks on her relatives or prompts the cantankerous, elderly Signora Gentile (Dora Romano) into a sweary outburst. Sorrentino clearly knows these people and these scenes, however heightened, ring true – even when the characters have an over-cranked, pantomime quality. Unfortunately, these enjoyable vignettes aren’t enough to sustain the movie through its ambling two-hour running time, leaving it looking desperate for a direction of some sort. Some story threads get tossed aside seemingly at random, while others become bizarrely prominent and others still – a very uncomfortable sex scene, for example – lack any material impact on the film around them.

Sorrentino assembles a talented ensemble cast for the movie, but struggles to pull all of these disparate pieces together into something coherent. Fittingly, perhaps, it has the quality of a half-remembered childhood reminiscence. But, like someone rambling about their childhood, it has a shelf life and a threshold after which it becomes a little dull. The Hand of God is a movie of powerful, well-observed moments, but unfortunately they’re moments spread very thinly over an otherwise unengaging dive into 1980s Naples. It certainly could’ve done with some of the magic and charisma of Maradona.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Tom Beasley is a freelance film journalist and wrestling fan. Follow him on Twitter via @TomJBeasley for movie opinions, wrestling stuff and puns.

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Hand of God, The (Italy, 2021)

The Hand of God is a coming-of-age story drawn from the memories of Italian writer/director Paolo Sorrentino. Infused with elements of nostalgia, it looks back wistfully at the last years of his youth spent in Naples during the mid-1980s. Although uneven, the movie effectively captures the lead character’s viewpoint, presenting events through the lens of someone who lacks the maturity to put everything into perspective. The Hand of God is at times amusing, at times sad, at times fantastical, and always heartfelt. The narrative sputters during the final third as Sorrentino wrestles with the finding the best stopping-point.

When the movie started, I thought I was watching the wrong film. For roughly the first ten minutes, The Hand of God provides a good imitation of an artsy horror film, with a busty woman, Patrizia (Luisa Ranierei), being taken to a mysterious locale to meet “The Little Monk.” Although only tangentially related to the main story, the opening is a cheeky way to pull the viewer into a story in which Patrizia features only as a minor character. We soon learn that The Hand of God focuses on the life and experiences of Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti), an older teenager who’s trying to transition from childhood to being an adult and having difficulty with the process. He’s a bit of a loner, having no friends or girlfriend. He dreams of becoming a filmmaker but isn’t sure how to go about it. He is close to his parents, Saverio (Toni Servillo) and Maria (Teresa Saponangelo), and lives with them and his two siblings, brother Marchino (Marlon Joubert) and sister Daniella (Rossella Di Lucca, little seen because there’s a running joke about the character always being in the bathroom). Fabietto’s passion, like that of everyone else in his family (and, by extension, the entire town) is soccer and, when superstar Diego Maradona signs a big deal to play for the Napoli team in 1984, it marks a memorable moment in the young man’s life.

Considering the nature of the film, Sorrentino unapologetically employs the “male gaze” for several scenes featuring actress Luisa Ranieri. In one, one breast has escaped from her shirt and hangs freely. In another, she lies naked on the deck of a boat, sunbathing. In both instances, Fabietto looks on, getting his first taste of the “forbidden fruit.” Neither scene is gratuitous, however. The important element isn’t Patrizia’s nudity but the awkward-yet-eager manner in which Fabietto reacts to it.

The meandering nature of the screenplay causes the movie to seem overlong as it noticeably loses momentum following a key coming-of-age moment. The episodes that follow don’t seem as fully realized as the ones that come before and, by the time The Hand of God ends, it’s floundering. On the whole, however, this is a charming and at times moving reminder of what it meant to be young in the 1980s.

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• Cider House Rules, The (1999)
• Citizen Kane (1941)
• War Zone, The (1999)
• Hole in My Heart, A (2005)
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• (There are no more better movies of Filippo Scotti)
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• (There are no more better movies of Toni Servillo)
• (There are no more worst movies of Toni Servillo)
• (There are no more better movies of Teresa Saponangelo)
• (There are no more worst movies of Teresa Saponangelo)

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The hand of god, common sense media reviewers.

Language, sex, nudity, death in striking Italian drama.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Family will see you through thick and thin. It's i

Teen Fabietto is a good student who loves his pare

The film is set in Italy and filmed in Italian. Se

(Spoiler alert for this section.) A teen loses his

Full-frontal female nudity; discussion of how attr

Very strong language includes variations on the "F

Cars in street scenes in 1980s Naples. Fabietto al

Adults smoke cigarettes and pipes and drink wine a

Parents need to know that The Hand of God is an Italian film that features characters dealing with difficult life situations; mature content includes sex, nudity, language, death, and grieving. The plot revolves around Fabietto (Filippo Scotti), a teen boy growing up in 1980s Naples. His extended family…

Positive Messages

Family will see you through thick and thin. It's important to forgive people their mistakes. Culture runs deep in people's beliefs and behaviors. Young people deserve to have carefree times.

Positive Role Models

Teen Fabietto is a good student who loves his parents and older brother. His parents are in love, but his father has some secrets. His mom plays some mean pranks on people, and relatives sometimes tease each one another mercilessly. Men sometimes speak disparagingly of women, and one man is violent with his wife. When Fabietto's parents die, his brother tells him he will need perseverance to survive, and Fabietto searches for his purpose.

Diverse Representations

The film is set in Italy and filmed in Italian. Several characters have physical disabilities, which are at times made fun of by other characters; one suffers from depression and is ultimately admitted to a psychiatric ward. Fat women talk about their diets.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

( Spoiler alert for this section.) A teen loses his parents. A man beats and screams at his wife; a couple fights loudly, sending their teen son into uncontrollable convulsions; characters fight and beat each other up; a woman says her miscarriage was brought on by her husband's violence; two people die from a carbon monoxide leak. A man grabs a woman's bottom. A character recalls wartime, when people were running down city streets to bomb shelters. Characters grieve.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Full-frontal female nudity; discussion of how attractive the woman is. In a sex scene between an older woman and a teenage boy, she asks him to brush her pubic hair. Women on the street appear to be sex workers; a man accuses his wife of prostituting herself. A married man has a second family. A man gives his son advice to take whatever he can get for his first sexual experience, even if the woman is a "dog." Drawings of a penis. A character tells a story of a woman trading kisses for things to eat.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Very strong language includes variations on the "F" word and "s--t." Also "a--hole," "crap," "bitch," "whore," "p---y," "slit," "balls," "moron," "schmuck," "piss," "crippled," "heck," "butt," "idiot." The film was reviewed in Italian with English subtitles.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Cars in street scenes in 1980s Naples. Fabietto always wears a Sony Walkman on his belt. The Napoli soccer team, which spent a fortune acquiring legendary player Diego Maradona in the 1980s, is featured.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults smoke cigarettes and pipes and drink wine and beer. Some men are smuggling cigarettes by boat. A man mentions "getting high," and a woman appears to be sniffing cocaine in the background of a scene.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Hand of God is an Italian film that features characters dealing with difficult life situations; mature content includes sex, nudity, language, death, and grieving. The plot revolves around Fabietto (Filippo Scotti), a teen boy growing up in 1980s Naples. His extended family includes an aunt with an abusive husband, a bad-tempered widower, and characters with physical disabilities and some mental health challenges. Fabietto discovers t hat his father has been keeping secrets from his mother, and ( spoiler alert ) when his parents die, he has to persevere and find a new will to live. Other adults fight, as well as drink and smoke. There's full-frontal nudity and a sex scene between an older woman and a teenage boy that includes explicit language. Women on the street appear to be sex workers, and a man accuses his wife of prostituting herself. There are drawings of a penis. Language in the English subtitles is very strong, with variations on "f--k" and "s--t," as well as "a--hole," "crap," "bitch," "whore," "p---y," "crippled," and many more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (1)

Based on 1 parent review

What's the Story?

Teen Fabietto (Filippo Scotti) lives with his loving parents, Saverio (Toni Servillo) and Maria (Teresa Saponangelo); big brother Marchino (Marlon Joubert)' and a sister who never leaves the bathroom in THE HAND OF GOD (E STATA LA MANO DI DIO). Life is good in 1980s Naples -- Fabietto has a large extended family and plans to study philosophy at the university. But when tragedy strikes, Fabietto has to redefine his life and his plans for the future.

Is It Any Good?

Italy's 2021 submission for the International Oscar is a beautiful coming-of-age story and a love letter to both director Paolo Sorrentino's native Naples and the art of filmmaking. There are many memorable images in The Hand of God , mostly involving a contrast of dark interiors with the sapphire Mediterranean and the blinding sun of southern Italy. Likewise, the film's characters and scenarios are extremely evocative, and many viewers likely won't be certain for the first hour or so of where this family portrait is leading, story-wise. Late in the film, after the story's arc is clear, Fabietto (fantastic newcomer Scotti) meets a fictionalized version of Napolese filmmaker Antonio Capuana, and the two have a conversation about what inspires meaningful movies. It feels like the Naples-born Sorrentino talking to a younger version of himself, and indeed the tragedy at the heart of this story is autobiographical.

A character in The Hand of God repeatedly asks why his relatives are all such "disappointments," and Sorrentino does seem to want to delve into the messiness of humankind, our contradictions and complications. Rather than depict Fabietto's parents as perfect, a lazier way of eliciting emotion upon ( spoiler alert ) their demise, Sorrentino shows that they have a wonderful love story while also living with infidelities and inconsistencies. The film forces viewers to confront their own biases, expectations, and moral discrepancies -- for example, in a sex scene that many would classify as inappropriate but which still conveys great tenderness and benevolence, or through quirky, Fellini-esque characters and disconcerting scenarios. The pranks and mutual critiques of family members in the film can border on cruelty, but family is always there -- stuffed into crowded apartments, watched over by black-clad matriarchs, celebrating soccer highs, commiserating life's lows. The movie's memorable blend of characters, ideas, and images add up to a striking film-watching experience, one with more cohesion and poignant storytelling than Sorrentino's 2014 Oscar-winner The Great Beauty .

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Fabietto's family in The Hand of God . How are they supportive of each other? How are they not?

What different meanings can you find in the title of this film?

Did the film's characters or scenarios surprise you in any way? How so? Do you think that was intentional?

How does soccer bring people of different ages and strata of society together in Naples? Where could you find out more about Diego Maradona?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 3, 2021
• On DVD or streaming : December 15, 2021
• Cast : Toni Servillo , Filippo Scotti , Teresa Saponangelo
• Director : Paolo Sorrentino
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Brothers and Sisters
• Character Strengths : Perseverance
• Run time : 130 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : sexual content, language, some graphic nudity and brief drug use
• Last updated : February 17, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Film review: ‘The Hand of God’ is an achingly beautiful tale of youth

Director Sorrentino describes his life of growing up in Naples

Paolo Sorrentino is arguably one of the world’s great directors, so it’s a special occasion when a new film of his is released. That’s most definitely the case with “The Hand of God,” which is something of a stylistic departure for the Italian heir to Fellini.

Most of Sorrentino’s films, especially the Oscar-winning “The Great Beauty,” have an operatic style, with swirling camerawork, high irony, with a touch of the sacred and profane. In “The Hand of God,” the approach is much more even-handed, and one might argue more mature.

The subject matter is close to Sorrentino’s heart. It’s about his childhood — his boisterous, colorful extended family who would gather for open-air meals in the countryside near Naples and argue and joke and juggle oranges.

As Sorrentino says in notes for the press, “The biggest difference between this film and my others I think is in the relationship between truth and lies. While my other films feed off lies in the hope of tracking down a shred of truth, this film started from true feelings that were then adapted to the cinematic form.”

“The Hand of God” unspools through the eyes of Sorrentino’s alter ego, Fabietto Schisa, played by newcomer Filippo Scotti, as he’s coming of age. Fabietto is 16 and at the awkward stage of not knowing what’s ahead. He doesn’t have a girlfriend. He doesn’t know what he wants to study. But throughout the movie, he begins to realize that he might want to be a filmmaker.

“This age is a damned age,” Sorrentino says of adolescence. “You’re living in a limbo, in that middle land between the child you no longer are and the grow-up you are not yet. Therefore your relationship with reality is already complicated.” And it gets even more complicated for Fabietto because of a family tragedy that mirrors a real-life one that happened to Sorrentino as an adolescent.

Fabietto is close to his parents Saverio and Maria, played by Sorrentino regulars Toni Servillo and Teresa Saponangelo. His parents have a seemingly close relationship, and often communicate merely by whistling, and he has a brother, Marchino (Marlon Joubert) as well as a sister who spends most of the movie locked away in a bathroom.

Like Fellini, Sorrentino has exceptionally interesting female characters who widen the scope of the storytelling. In “The Hand of God,” there are two such characters: Fabietto’s voluptuous aunt Patrizia (Lisa Ranieri) and Baronessa Focale (Betti Pedrazzi).

Patrizia sets some of the movie’s magic in motion when she is approached by a noted Neapolitan, San Gennaro (Enzo Decaro), and taken to see the Napoli legend The Little Monk, who bestows her with the ability to conceive a child — something she has failed to do with her physically abusive husband.

Patrizia becomes pregnant only to lose the child during one of her husband’s beatings. Yet she is a tragic but mysterious figure for Fabietto, especially since she has been known to disrobe at family gatherings.

The baroness, meanwhile, lives in the upstairs apartment and makes clear that her social standing is far above that of the Schisas. But by the end of the movie, she makes a gesture to Fabietto that is both generous and a bit creepy.

Other characters make memorable impressions as well, like the meanest woman in Naples, Señora Gentile (Dora Romano) and an especially overweight Schisa relative who shows up at a family gathering with a husband-to-be who has lost his voice box and holds a vibrating device up to his throat to speak. The only problem: He won’t shut up.

Amid all of these events in 1980s Naples, one stands out above all others for Fabietto: the arrival of the soccer great Diego Maradona to play for the Naples team. And it’s Maradona who inadvertently saves Fabietto from a family tragedy. Fabietto begs to stay in Naples and skip a vacation so that he can see Maradona play, and various relatives say this was “the hand of God” at play.

Famously, in real life, Maradona was also credited with using the phrase “the hand of God.” During the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, he scored Argentina’s two winning goals against England. The second goal, according to soccer legend, is considered an eternal masterpiece. But during the first, replays would reveal Maradona’s hand had fouled the ball. As the press notes explain, “When asked about it after the game, Maradona cheekily replied: ‘A little with the head of Maradona, a little with the hand of God.’ “

As Sorrentino tells a personal story, it’s important for him to get into many of his filmmaking influences. “The Hand of God” is full of them.

During “The Hand of God,” Fellini is holding auditions for a new movie, and Fabietto’s brother tries out. Then there’s Zeffirelli, who is part of a prank, and there’s a videotape of Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” sitting atop the Schisa family’s TV. But a real-life director, Antonio Capuano, plays a central role in the movie, just as he did in Sorrentino’s life.

Near the end, Fabietto meets Capuano, who bluntly advises the young man to be completely honest with himself if he hopes to become a director. “The dialogue with Capuano … is a composite of many conversations we’ve had, not only when working together but in our long friendship,” Sorrentino says.

Ultimately, “The Hand of God” is about finding a way amid a tragic loss and the awkwardness of adolescence. Fabietto is walking through a no man’s land, and he’s looking for a way forward.

Movie lovers should celebrate that Sorrentino found not only a way forward, but also a beautiful way to fill the years that followed.

“The Hand of God” opened theatrically in select theaters on Dec. 3 and is on Netflix starting Dec. 15. Visit netflix.com/thehandofgod .

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Spy x Family Code: White review – ingenious espionage antics with special-power family

Popular manga characters receive their first film adaptation as they seek out a villainous colonel and an elusive dessert, brought off with great style by director Takashi Katagiri

A fter a successful TV adaptation, the popular characters of the bestselling manga Spy x Family are ready for their big screen closeups. Directed by Takashi Katagiri from an original story, this highly entertaining film maintains the ingenious blend of espionage escapades and slice-of-life shenanigans that has made the series a smash hit, all while expanding its set pieces to a more spectacular scale. To achieve this delicate balance between comedy, suspense and action thrills is no easy feat and for the most part, the film accomplishes this mission well.

The lovable Forger trio of spy papa Loid, assassin mama Yor, and telepathic daughter Anya, are swiftly reintroduced; this fake family embarks on a hilarious adventure involving an elusive dessert, stolen negatives and a villainous colonel. Brought together by a top-secret assignment, the Forgers must hide their special powers from one another, a conundrum made even more comical by the inclusion of their fluffy pet Bond, a lab dog that has the ability to see the future.

Although modelled after cold war conflicts, any hint of politics is a mere MacGuffin, adding a touch of the pastiche to the film’s universe. From the jazzy score to chic gadgets and disguises, the tactile details are a welcome change from other movies that prioritise action over elegance. Spy × Family Code: White doesn’t always get the balance right; compared with the first half which, like the TV series, sees child-rearing as its own kind of mission impossible, some of the later scenes are bogged down by lengthy showdowns between the Forgers and their foes. The wacky humour, however, re-emerges in a surreal, gorgeously animated daydream dedicated to the god of poop. It is this full-throated commitment to silliness that makes this film, and Spy x Family as a whole, a singularly delightful experience.

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It follows Taylor Pherry, who is given a mission from God Himself: to tell his family's stories and inspire his community. What he doesn't know is that the Devil has plans of his own. It follows Taylor Pherry, who is given a mission from God Himself: to tell his family's stories and inspire his community. What he doesn't know is that the Devil has plans of his own. It follows Taylor Pherry, who is given a mission from God Himself: to tell his family's stories and inspire his community. What he doesn't know is that the Devil has plans of his own.

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