Starring
Jean-Louis Trintignant 
Stefania Sandrelli
Dominique Sanda

“Transports you into a world of pure style.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times (Read full review here - registration required)

“An eye-watering testimony to the erstwhile dash of international cinema... an orgasm of coolness, ravishing compositions, camera gymnastics and atmospheric resonance.”
– Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice (Read full review here)

“Voluptuously styled to a degree rarely seen in cinema, Bernardo Bertolucci's gorgeous 1970 political thriller, set in a noirish, Mussolini-era Europe, will always be a benchmark of high-art exquisiteness.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

“It's still a knock-out... As momentous as the work of Welles & company on Citizen Kane, showing a new generation how to look at movies... [The] rerelease at Film Forum proves that The Conformist has been the single most influential movie of the past 35 years.”
– Armond White, New York Press (Read full review here)

(1970) In Mussolini’s Italy, Jean-Louis Trintignant’s repressed haut bourgeois Marcello Clerici, trying to purge memories of a youthful, homosexual episode (and murder), joins the Fascists in a desperate attempt to fit in. As the reluctant Judas motors to his personal Gethsemane (the assassination of his leftist mentor, whose Paris address, in a pointed homage, matched Jean-Luc Godard’s real one), he flashes back to a dance party for the blind; an insane asylum in a stadium; and wife Stefania Sandrelli and lover Dominque Sanda dancing the tango in a working-class hall. But those are only a few of the anthology pieces of this political thriller, others including Trintignant’s honeymoon coupling with Sandrelli in a train compartment as the sun sets outside their window; a bimbo lolling on the desk of a fascist functionary, glimpsed in the recesses of his cavernous office; a murder victim’s hands leaving bloody streaks on a limousine parked in a wintry forest. Bertolucci’s masterwork, adapted from the novel by Alberto Moravia, boasts an authentic Art Deco look created by production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, a score by the great Georges Delerue (Contempt, Jules and Jim) and eyepopping color cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (who personally oversaw the film’s 1995 restoration). “Carries with it a rejuvenating jolt of youthful creative energy, the memory of a time when movies were the most important art and their creative possibilities seemed endless.” – Dave Kehr. “Juggling past and present with the same bravura flourish as Welles in Citizen Kane, Bertolucci conjures a dazzling historical and personal perspective (the marbled insane asylum where his father is incarcerated; the classical vistas of Mussolini’s corridors of power, the dance hall where two women tease in an ambiguous tango; the forest road where the assassination runs horribly counter to expectation), demonstrating how the search for normality ends in the inevitable discovery that there is no such thing.” – Tom Milne, Time Out (London).
In Italian, with English subtitles.
A Paramount Release.