Journey to Italy

Roberto Rossellini, Italy 1953. 86 mins. Certificate PG

A landmark in the history of cinema, Roberto Rossellini’s classic is “one of the most important films you’ve never seen,” now lovingly restored for your viewing pleasure.

Starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders as Katherine and Alex Joyce, Journey to Italy follows the British couple as they visit Naples to sell off an inherited villa. There Roberto Rossellini — master of neo-realism — uses the post-war Italian landscape as a striking backdrop to a grinding and painful relationship breakdown.

Journey to Italy is the final film in a trilogy by the director starring his then wife Bergman. Shot on location and largely improvised, it is thought to reflect the fraught nature of their own relationship at the time.

Treated with derision on its release in 1953, the film has been hailed a masterpiece by filmmakers from Godard to Scorcese and is widely credited as marking the birth of modern cinema.

★★★★★ ‘Restored and rereleased, this study of an ‘anti-honeymoon’ is electrifying and moving.’ Peter Bradshaw, THE GUARDIAN

★★★★★ ‘This goes beyond mere artifice, reaching instead for a wrenchingly sincere expression of vulnerable togetherness in the face of time and mortality.’ Trevor Johnston, TIME OUT

★★★★★ ‘Put simply, in both narrative and cinematic terms, what we’ve witnessed is a miracle’. Jordan Cronk, LITTLE WHITE LIES

★★★★ ‘The film magnificently justifies its classic status’ Derek Malcolm, EVENING STANDARD

★★★★ ‘Unnervingly contemporary…even now it can feel like a bulletin from the future.’ A.O Scott, NEW YORK TIMES