THE SICILIAN REVIEWED
“The Sicilian” is the second best Salvatore Giuliano movie ever filmed. While heavy editing has damaged the film’s reputation, this is a chance to see what Cimino intended for the first time. Well, for those of us that weren’t Z Channel subscribers. What did I think of a longer cut of one of Cimino’s underrated. It still suffers from being the “Rogue One” to the Godfather films. Except Rogue One gets to actually mention Star Wars and have a degree of relation.
Christopher Lambert is brutally miscast in the film to the point of being an ongoing joke. While John Turturro, Terence Stamp and Joss Ackland make it work for them, Lambert just keeps getting worse as the film continues. Cimino has done a better job at direction, as his muted colors and camera push just brutalizes this look at Sicily in the 1950s. Releases like this are why I appreciate Shout Factory and how it handles the Blu-Ray format.
Not everything is going to be a winner, but we need to have a proper sense of history. Tracking creative properties across time allows us to see what works and doesn’t work with film. It also cracks open those films that get lost to the glut of recent history. You’d be surprised the amount of people that don’t know there is a Godfather spin-off novel that begat this film. There’s also people that haven’t seen what Michael Cimino has evolved into recently. I love cult cinema.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- Nothing
A/V QUALITY STATS
- 2.35:1 1080p transfer
- DTS-HD 2.0 master audio track