This labor of love represents one of the greatest triumphs of director Martin Scorsese's career. Picking up where his "Personal Journey Through American Movies" left off, "My Voyage to Italy" expands upon and enriches the themes of the earlier documentary as the focus shifts to Italian cinema. It's not merely a great film about Italian movies, though it is that--with the help of collaborators such as the always incisive film critic Kent Jones and the always reliable editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese crams a semester's worth of Italian film history and criticism into four hours. Beyond being a thoroughly entertaining and insightful cinema course, however, "My Voyage to Italy" is a marvelous film about the intersection between movies and day-to-day life, both on a personal scale (as Scorsese recounts the effect that Italian films had on him and his family as he was growing up) and an international one (as Scorsese delineates the relationship between movements such as Italian neorealism and the historical context of the time). This is a movie that reminds us that movies matter, and Scorsese and his collaborators appropriately make the connection between the films under discussion and more recent works from countries such as Taiwan and Iran---showing us that the tradition of socially engaged filmmaking is alive and well, and that the world is a richer place because of it. This is a gift to film lovers everywhere, and stands alongside "Casino" and "Kundun" as yet another recent masterpiece by perhaps America's greatest filmmakers.
Review of My Voyage to Italy
