Parthenope
A24 | Release Date: February 7, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
52
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 27 Critic Reviews
Positive:
7
Mixed:
17
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
90
VarietySiddhant AdlakhaMay 21, 2024
Parthenope is a film that rumbles with the hum of nostalgia, recapturing the feeling of youthful, summer freedom while refusing to shy away from the uncertainties of young adulthood. But it’s no mere coming-of-age story; rather, it’s a film about coming-to-oneself. Read full review
88
The Film VerdictDeborah YoungMay 23, 2024
Sorrentino somehow makes it work in a film that is truly a sensual pleasure to watch. Read full review
82
TheWrapSteve PondMay 21, 2024
You could argue that Sorrentino is treading water after the deeply personal explorations in “The Hand of God,” but these are rich and mysterious waters to tread. “Parthenope” is a work of casual mastery; you could say that it’s great and it’s beautiful. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriFeb 6, 2025
Our protagonist comes to feel like an avatar of the very ideas of youth and possibility, which also makes her an avatar of the opposite of those things — the idea that life eventually passes us all by. In creating a film about one beautiful person, Sorrentino reminds us that, in our memories, we were all beautiful once. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comIsaac Feldberg Feb 7, 2025
Made in collaboration with Yves Saint Laurent, “Parthenope” is nothing if not a sumptuous feast for the senses. Read full review
75
The PlaylistGregory EllwoodMay 21, 2024
Parthenope’s fictional life story may actually not be as intriguing as Sorrentino thinks it is. A movie that begins with blistering sex appeal really starts to lose momentum in its third act. Read full review
63
ObserverEmily ZemlerFeb 7, 2025
A film can exist for aesthetic value alone, but only if it doesn’t try to expand itself to unreached depths. In the end, Parthenope seems to assert is that beauty is unappreciated until it vanishes—a lesson we all learn too late—but like its lead character, the film remains too shallow to fully understand. Read full review
60
The Irish TimesTara BradyApr 30, 2025
These picaresque and picturesque adventures fail to coalesce into a movie. But it’s impossible to argue with Daria D’Antonio’s ravishing cinematography and an unexpectedly moving coda featuring Stefania Sandrelli as an older Parthenope. Read full review
60
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzFeb 18, 2025
There is a hazy, gauzy quality to all of this, which keeps things just out of reach. Certainly, it looks like a lot of fun to be young, beautiful and rich in Naples. But Parthenope is also out of reach, almost an idea as much as a character. What that idea is I’m not quite certain. Read full review
60
Screen RantMae AbdulbakiFeb 13, 2025
Parthenope is sensual and visually exquisite. It might not dig way too deep into its message, but it does get it across by the end. Read full review
60
The New York TimesBeatrice LoayzaFeb 6, 2025
Parthenope, like Sorrentino’s previous films, is an intentionally garish display of sex and luxury that is both irritating and oddly seductive. Read full review
60
Time OutAnna SmithMay 22, 2024
Sorrentino is clearly trying to move with the times – even if he’s still most comfortable in the decades he’s depicting here on screen. Read full review
58
The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyFeb 7, 2025
There are, in trademark Sorrentino style, moments of Catholic-Church-baiting blasphemy and playful surrealism (a gigantic bloated toddler makes an appearance), but for all of its eccentricities and ruminations, Parthenope can’t overcome the very prosaic problem of a main character who isn’t really much of a character at all. Read full review
55
The Daily BeastNick SchagerFeb 7, 2025
As sumptuous and vapid as a commercial for Dior or Chanel’s latest fragrance. Read full review
50
Original-CinChris KnightFeb 20, 2025
As written by Italy’s Paolo Sorrentino (who also directs), there is precious little going on beneath that alabaster exterior. One can only have characters ask each other “What are you thinking?” so many times before it feels as though the question is being begged. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Anne T. DonahueFeb 20, 2025
The film is, true to Sorrentino’s style, breathtakingly shot. It is a vibrant, arresting love letter to Naples complemented by the choices of costume artistic director Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent. Every shot is intentional, every close-up serves a purpose. The problem, however, is that the purpose is as surface deep as the characters Parthenope consistently reckons with. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleFeb 11, 2025
The movie is built on the drifting life of a smart, stunningly beautiful and unfulfilled woman. But “Parthenope” shouldn’t have to strain as hard as it does — it plays like a fragrance ad. That qualifies as a disappointment for a filmmaker whose sensualist impulses are God-tier. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineSeth KatzFeb 3, 2025
The film’s succession of symbolically loaded vignettes is less meaningful than intended. Read full review
50
Screen DailyLee MarshallMay 21, 2024
There is no faulting the radiant performance of Celeste Dalla Porta in her feature debut. It’s the objectification of her character that’s the issue – plus Sorrentino’s trick, here indulged even more flagrantly than in The Great Beauty, of privileging flashy audio-visual tableaux over narrative coherence. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyMay 21, 2024
There’s much to appreciate in Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino’s second consecutive bittersweet paean to his home city of Naples. At least for a while, before the too-muchness of it takes hold and the character at the center stops being intriguing and just becomes a siren with an air of mystery but too little evidence of all that’s supposedly going on behind it. Read full review
50
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMay 21, 2024
Preoccupied with the idea that a lack of self-knowledge is what makes people mysterious, Parthenope denies its namesake any real interiority, convinced that depriving us the chance to appreciate her perspective might somehow enhance her rhetorical value. Read full review
40
Rolling StoneDavid FearFeb 7, 2025
Parthenope wants to be a feminine epic. It’s really just an update of those Bardot arthouse skin flicks, Italian style. But it can take solace in easily being an early contender for the horniest movie of the year. Read full review
40
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 22, 2024
Of course, Sorrentino’s way with a camera will always be intriguing and exhilarating to some degree. Yet Parthenope simply floats complacently across the screen, like a two-hour ad for some impossibly expensive cologne. Read full review
40
The TelegraphTim RobeyMay 21, 2024
We’ve had two-hours-plus to leaf through this empty life, but Sorrentino makes it amount to almost nothing, except his usual love letter to Napoli, and an added ode to side-boob. Read full review
37
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanFeb 14, 2025
If “Parthenope” is a love letter to his hometown and its subject an embodiment of the city’s idiosyncrasies and contradictions — beauty and decay, religion and hypocrisy — the whole thing comes across like a deranged mash note, more off-putting than seductive. Read full review
30
ColliderEmma KielyJul 10, 2024
Parthenope is a decades-spanning slice-of-life movie that has no interest in diving into the complexities of its protagonist. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChronicleBrandon YuFeb 7, 2025
It can be charmingly elliptical at first (and even again toward end, when things get momentarily, gleefully weird), but the film gradually loses its power as Parthenope’s life becomes a kind of pointless merry-go-round showcasing new permutations of her seductive beauty. Read full review
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