Book excerpt: "Paolo Sorrentino, the director of Il Divo (2008) and The Great Beauty (2013) and the creator of the HBO series The Young Pope (2016) (and The New Pope (2019)), has in recent years emerged as one of the most popular figures in 21st century European filmmaking. Critics, however, remain sharply divided in their opinions of his films and what tradition his work can be placed in. Questions of what his stylistic relationship to Neorealism, the touchstone of virtually all Italian cinema, his local/national identity, and the posturing of his films vis a vis gender and a seemingly reactionary conceptualization of masculinity, his embracing or subverting of the role of art house "auteur," surround his films, with little consensus as to the answers. He is a confounding figure that seems to occupy contradictory roles in each of his films. In taking up the question of how best to contextualize Sorrentino's work, this book tracks his progressive departure from the localized world of Neapolitan and middlebrow "quality cinema" tropes in favor of a more expansive and transnational approach to filmmaking. Sorrentino's more recent work explicitly engages late-capitalist spaces and aesthetics and problematizes authorial interpretation, the idea of the "foreign" film, the supposed dichotomy between the "realist" ethos that has, in the past, dominated Italian cinema, and a "post-realist"/"post-modernist" emphasis on style. Critically, Kilbourn tracks two key themes through Sorretino's oeuvre: the idea of "impegno" - often translated as "commitment" and referring to the social activist aims of Neorealism - and the director's repeated attempts to create a distinctive kind of subjectivity. Though often thought to be mutually exclusive with the flamboyant and de-subjectivized style in much of contemporary art cinema, Sorrentino continues to find ways to merge these themes in his work"--