New Books In European Studies

Russell J. A. Kilbourn’s The Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino: Commitment to Style (Wallflower Press, 2020) is the first comprehensive study published in the English-speaking world on one of the most compelling figures in twenty-first centry European film, Italian 2014 Academy Award recipient Paolo Sorrentino. Kilbourn’s book offers close readings of Sorrentino’s cinema in eight dense and elegantly written chapters and one coda: from the filmmaker’s first feature One Man Up, to The Consequences of Love, The Family Friend, Il Divo, This Must Be the Place, The Great Beauty, Youth, and the TV series The Young Pope, produced by HBO. The coda discusses the biopic on Silvio Berlusconi Loro (Them), which came out in 2018. While contextualizing Sorrentino within the legacy of Italian cinema tradition, Kilbourn establishes meaningful connections with international filmmakers (from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing to Mary’s Harron’s American Psycho, among many others), literary texts (such as Primo Levi’s If This is a Man), an