Critic Reviews

Time stands still and leaps across the epochs in Below the Clouds, which reveals how much our world has been transformed over the millennia, while also remaining the same.

It is an intensely disquieting, utterly distinctive film and a superb final panel to his triptych.

Vesuvius might erupt again. The angel of history keeps moving forward. Time destroys, preserves, and then returns (one hopes, at least). Rosi’s film is a meditative and moving document showing that process and possibility.

To the outsider, Naples is often seen as a city of colour and life, a place of bubbling exuberance. Not so in Giancarlo Rosi’s strikingly melancholic documentary portrait of the southern Italian metropolis.

While among his warmest works, rich in pleasures of place and weather and human motion, it’s no empty travelogue, notwithstanding the sometimes glistening beauty of Rosi’s black-and-white cinematography.

In Pompei: Below the Clouds, Rosi is as quietly watchful as ever, though he is either remarkably skilled or remarkably fortunate in finding individuals whose voices of conscience, matched by action, can stand in for his own.

Shot in black and white and filled with images of collapse, Below the Clouds is nevertheless a strangely hopeful work.

Taking its cues from those ancient remains, Rosi’s deserving Special Prize winner at Venice gifts us a pristine, durable snapshot of Naples.

Below the Clouds is a tone poem paying tribute to a region that is suffused with beauty and haunted by loss. It wanders, to be sure, but in a way that’s the point.

The notion of Naples as a place in perpetual contact with its ghostly, grand history, whether you’re a citizen living on top of it or a visitor passing through, is what gives Gianfranco Rosi’s patient, eccentric documentary Pompei: Below the Clouds its strangely beautiful atmosphere of reflection and restlessness.