Pompei: Below the Clouds

idk why but calling the fire department just to ask the time is so italian coded

allain♡

Past and present, flesh and ash, enormity and the infinitesimal: Gianfranco Rosi’s astonishing, Venice-prizewinning documentary is a marbled study in high contrast. In bone white and velvety black, pin-sharp chiaroscuro photography screens an active volcano for the…

MUBI

FELLOW LOVERS OF NAPLES will be pleased that this meditation on the city below Mount Vesuvius captures the essence of its enduring mystery. Several diverse environments are laid out like overlapping snapshots, each hinting at how the distant past persists in the present. As…

Carl Russo

The film seems assured that the sheer poetry of its imagery and larger motifs can do most of the heavy lifting, and to some extent, it does: a loose profile of sort to a Naples below all the cloud and dust, between past and present, but the film has perhaps placed a bit too…

Milesware

Titti Life changer

Gabriele Niola

Loved this. Stark black and white photography capturing what feels like a present-day Vittorio De Seta vignette. Instead of studying the unspoken ecosystem of miners and fisherman, it’s call centers and archaeologists with modern technology at their disposal. Vesuvius…

Taylor Williams

The history of Vesuvius, whose eruption led to the decimation of Pompeii, has served as a shot that continues to be heard round the world. So when Gianfranco Rosi’s gorgeous, black and white shot documentary “Below the Clouds” fixes its lens on the mountain, you immediately…

Robert Daniels

What gives "Pompei: Below the Clouds" its force is the way it places radically different forms of vulnerability on the same continuum. The call center scenes are crucial here. We hear ordinary distress in its most unadorned form: a woman facing domestic violence, a man…

La Boscaiola

It is stronger the closer it remains to the shadow of Vesuvius. The way it uses theaters and the proximity between film image and archeology is good. Death hangs over it. Like some other Rosi movies, the stab at covering so much ground dilutes the effect some.

Filipe Furtado