Throughout his career, Paolo Sorrentino has had to endure unhelpful comparisons with his great compatriot Federico Fellini. With his follow-up to the slightly underrated This Must be the Place , the Italian director looks to be consciously embracing that supposed kinship. His magnificent new film moves in similar territory to that of Fellini's La Dolce Vita . But The Great Beauty still feels very much Sorrentino's own: sinister, surreal, on-edge, romantic. If it were a little less in love with its own reflection, it might well qualify as a masterpiece.

Toni Servillo, masterly as Giulio Andreotti in Sorrentino's Il Divo , turns up as a celebrated journalist contemplating a life lived among preening socialites, pretentious artists and deluded drug addicts. This Jap Gambardella once wrote a great novel, but the disorder of Rome's social whirl has kept him from following up his early promise. Over the course of the film, he gradually comes to terms with the reasons for his decadent decline and contemplates a surge forward.

The film is defiantly short on structure, but the beautiful chaos is so chaotically beautiful that only the surliest viewer will think to complain.

As a heightened critique of pointless party-going, the film makes The Great Gatsby look like, well, a bad Baz Luhrmann film. But what really sets The Great Beauty apart from the pack is its ability to capture the sadness of a wasted life. Lying on his bed at night, Jap looks to the ceiling and finds it transformed into a sapphire sea that figured in a formative romantic experience. It sounds impossibly sentimental. But the convincing deflation in Toni Servillo's hitherto wry face brings genuine tragedy to the scene and to the film's bittersweet denouement.

A stunning piece of work.