Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
As Garibaldi's troops begin the unification of Italy in the 1860s, an aristocratic Sicilian family grudgingly adapts to the sweeping social changes undermining their way of life.
Visconti's The Leopard is a monumental achievement in Italian cinema. The plot masterfully weaves personal and historical decline, anchored by Burt Lancaster's towering performance as Prince Salina — one of cinema's great portrayals of aristocratic melancholy. Cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno is ravishing, the Sicilian landscapes and interiors bathed in golden, elegiac light. The film's novelty lies in its singular meditation on historical inevitability and class obsolescence, handled with an operatic grandeur entirely its own. The celebrated ballroom finale is extraordinary but somewhat exhausting in its length, making the ending fractionally less satisfying than the film's magnificent earlier passages.