La Grazia

Paolo Sorrentino's La Grazia opened in 2025 and was nominated for the European Film Award for Best Screenwriter (Sorrentino). The film consolidated Sorrentino, after his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty (2013) and his recent autobiographical The Hand of God (2021), as one of the most internationally significant Italian directors of his generation. The title (meaning Grace in Italian) sets the central register of the work.

The film is a sustained meditation on grace, both divine and human, rendered in Sorrentino's signature visual extravagance. The restless, swooping camera that has been a hallmark of his work since Il Divo (2008) transforms the mundane into the mythic across the film's extended runtime. Sorrentino's continuing collaboration with cinematographer Daria D'Antonio (who took over the role from Luca Bigazzi after Loro) produced a register that has become increasingly distinctive across his recent work.

The film operates simultaneously as character study, philosophical-religious investigation, and theatrical formal experiment in the broader Sorrentino register. The screenplay, working in his characteristic mode of extended interior monologue and aphoristic-comic dialogue, anchors a film that has been compared to Fellini's later religious-thematic work in its sustained register. The film's reception was distinctly divided across markets (characteristic of Sorrentino's recent international reception) with substantial critical and audience response in Italy and a more polarised reaction internationally.