When Cinema Paradiso won the Academy Award as best foreign film in 1990, it was an open secret that the movie the voters loved was not quite the same as the one director Giuseppe Tornatore made. Reports had it that Harvey Weinstein, the boss at Miramax, had trimmed not just a shot here or there, but a full 51 minutes from the film. Audiences loved the result, however, and the movie is consistently voted among the 100 best movies of all time at the Internet Movie Database.
Now comes a theatrical release of Cinema Paradiso: The New Version, with an ad campaign that promises, Discover what really happened to the love of a lifetime. Considering that it was Miramax that made it impossible for us to discover this in the 1988 version, the ad is sublime chutzpah. And the movie is now so much longer, and covers so much more detail, that it almost plays as its own sequel.