Popular reviews

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  Review by russman ★★★½ 3

  Three Chaplains walk into a monastery. Two vanish into thin air

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★½ 1

  "I think one can really be at peace with the lord without removing themselves from the world. After all, it was created for us."

  Logistics of war and the human costs surrounding them. Firstly, in revisiting this film after a few years I hoped I would have more concrete, articulate thoughts about it - as that old cliche goes, one is supposedly more impulsive and emotional when they are younger. Yet, my response seeing this as a 26 year old in 2017 was almost identical as it was to seeing it as a 20 year old in 2011. Different episodes (1 particularly) do nothing for me, while some hit me in ways never before (4), but even if there were…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½

  Passing through a war zone. True film reportage because it is about experience and not facts.

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  Review by Jerry ★★★½ 4

  For his follow-up to the neorealist masterpiece Rome, Open City, Rossellini trades in intimacy for scope with Paisan; a film that examines the importance of communication, connection and commitment during wartime. Told through six vignettes, with each penned by a different screenwriter (including a young Fellini), what we have here are essentially moral tales set against the backdrop of the allied invasion of Italy. Each vignette takes place in a different city, from when the Americans first land, to the Winter prior to the conclusion of WWII, and tell varying tales of struggles with lingual or culture barriers, moments of realization and courage, and the atrocities of war. Barring a few flubs in the editing room, the film is a…

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  Review by BrandonHabes ★★★★★ 9

  “Paisà.” A corrupted word from the Italian-American “paesano,” roughly translated as “buddy,” “countryman,” or “neighbor,” often used by American soldiers during the war as a friendly way of greeting their Italian comrades. 

  The word underscores the entire philosophical tenor and humanist soul of Rossellini’s avant-garde masterpiece, a defining film of the neorealist movement that is much closer to traditional definitions of neorealism than his previous work. Nonprofessional actors, authentic locations, and documentary newsreel techniques are all in full force, with less melodrama, less narrative, and less convention at the helm. 

  There is nothing original about Rossellini relying upon these elements, as they were also used during the fascist period, but the degree to which he moves away from traditional, Hollywood-style…

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  Review by Graham ★★★★ 1

  If ever there was a stark vision of wartime Italy and a transforming nation, this could be it. As a piece of dramatic history, Roberto Rossellini's Paisà is entirely compelling.

  Made in six parts, the film delivers its messages among scenes of the allied invasion into the Italian heartland in a way that largely focuses on the human reaction rather than the 'muck and bullets' of war. Focus, determination, fear, loss and most of all, hope.

  The start of the film sets the scene for what is to come. US troops arrive in a Sicilian village, searching for German soldiers. Local girl Carmela leads the boys north... The clouds darken. The soundtrack turns sombre. The lighting shifts to highlight the…

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  Review by Jerry ★★★★★

  Rome Open City had been a triumph above all of Rossellini the producer, Paisà would be Rossellini the director.

  But the fact that Roberto initially planned to hand Paisà’s actual direction over to a number of other directors whom he would merely supervise, indicates that he still thought of himself as primarily an
  organizer rather than the creative artist the movie reveals.

  Principally, Roberto wanted to be free.

  Twenty-five years later he told an American audience, “You have no idea—this is really a confession—how much I hate Open City and how much I love Paisan more. Open City is full of old ingredients.… Paisan is purer… less seductive.… Just the facts are all there. My starting point was a moral…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★½ 1

  Once again incorporating documentary footage with a neorealist narrative to substantially meaningful effect, Paisan is another extraordinary war drama from Roberto Rossellini. It's the second entry in his neorealist trilogy, and while perhaps it is the least well known of them, it's undoubtedly comparable in respects to greatness. Constructed from six separate instalments, with none of them succumbing to overwhelming melodramatics, it accentuates a collision between two very diverse societies.

  The various storylines all take place over a few months beginning in nineteen forty-three, and they principally pursue the sustained fighting of the allied forces as they journey northwards through Italy and spotlights the communication difficulties experienced due to language complications between American and Italians soldiers. The film's themes of miscommunications engendered by conflict as well as the arising portrayal of sarcasm are ingrained in an innovative story that is consistently engaging.

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★

  Bazin said this film's individual unit was not the "shot" but the "fact," and if PAISAN's sketches indulge in types and ordered mini-narratives, it is Rossellini's open but nevertheless controlled aestheticization and his minute, compartmentalized vignettes depict realism as it should be. Rossellini excels at setting up a social backdrop but working resolutely through an intimate focus that digs into characters in means that stretch beyond social conditions. If De Sica's films, for example, are directly a product of the surrounding rubble and poverty, Rossellini's themes in PAISAN—miscommunication, perspective, loneliness—stretch so far outside the military and socioeconomic context that at times it is the characters who seem to birth the stark ruin around them, a collapsed Tower of Babel.

  Rossellini's…

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★½ 4

  Filmed in the ruins of post-war Italy, Paisan is a vital neorealist portrait of a country in chaos. Across six stories, it starts with the Allied invasion of Sicily and then moves up the Italian Peninsula, following liberation through the eyes of ordinary people. Paisan is a collage of a country, centered on a series of friendships between Italians and Allied soldiers. It is a film of human understanding, about crossing the language barrier to find hope and kindness. In the very first story a woman and a foreign soldier are able to find a peace with nothing but a few words. At times Paisan is harsh, filled with impoverished people and the suffering of civilians in wartime. Bloodied bodies…

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★★

  Meraviglioso tributo allo spirito umano! A shockingly profound and audacious letter to the horrendous consequences of war, brilliantly orchestrated by the important filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, divided into six parts:

  + Episode I: A brief encounter.
  + Episode II: Separate ways.
  + Episode III: True identities.
  + Episode IV: Escapist love.
  + Episode V: Spiritual aid.
  + Episode VI: United for glory.

  Geographical boundaries are shattered; nevertheless, communication is hampered and all that remains are words, stares, reactions and plain silence.

  99/100

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 2

  If Rossellini’s first entry in his ‘war trilogy’ encompassed the emotional flaying of one city by conflict, its sequel,  “Paisan,” depicts the devastation it wrought across an entire country. 

  Cities have souls. Countries have nationalism. And that is where the cores of “Rome, Open City” and “Paisan” diverge. 

  Part one, “Rome, Open City,” had a concentrated focus on a small group of anti-fascist revolutionaries. Their anger and losses were personal and palpable, even though their stakes were small. 

  Its ‘sequel,’ “Paisan,” is a six-segment anthology film that tracks the allied liberation of Italy from south to north. Characters do not overlap between the stories, but the theme is consistent:

  There are gaps in language and communication, but they are nothing…