Cinema Paraíso

The film's final hour, where nearly all the previous unseen material resides, is unconvincing soap opera that Tornatore was right to cut.

I'm happy to have seen it -- not as an alternate version, but as the ultimate exercise in viewing deleted scenes.

In the director's cut, the film is not only a love song to the movies but it also is more fully an example of the kind of lush, all-enveloping movie experience it rhapsodizes.

Where the original release was an essay in childish delight and adolescent longing, topped off by a muted coda implying that you really can go home again, the reissue is a fully realized epic of the heart.

The heightened symmetry of this new/old Cinema Paradiso makes the film a fuller experience, like an old friend haunted by the exigencies of time.

This director's cut -- which adds 51 minutes -- takes a great film and turns it into a mundane soap opera.

As it turns out, you can go home again.

Still rapturous after all these years, Cinema Paradiso stands as one of the great films about movie love.

Less front-loaded and more shapely than the two-hour version released here in 1990.

Anyone who feels as attached to the history of movies as Tornatore obviously does, there are more than enough irresistible moments.

This version's no classic like its predecessor, but its pleasures are still plentiful.

For the most part, this hamfisted movie is very enjoyable.

It is, in a word, exquisite.

This version moves beyond the original's nostalgia for the communal film experiences of yesteryear to a deeper realization of cinema's inability to stand in for true, lived experience.

The new version isn't just endless. It heightens the deeply conservative spirit of Giuseppe Tornatore's fable in a surprising new way.

More romantic, more emotional and ultimately more satisfying than the teary-eyed original.

I don't think most of the people who loved the 1989 Paradiso will prefer this new version. But I do.