A Brighter Tomorrow

Most directors slide into their seventies by making a polite, sweeping period piece or a somber meditation on mortality, but Nanni Moretti has decided to stage a charming, deeply stubborn protest against the entire 21st century. A Brighter Tomorrow (originally Il sol dell'avvenire) feels like a dispatch from a dying planet—specifically, the planet of "Cinema with a Capital C"—sent by a man who refuses to believe the atmosphere has turned into pure, unbreathable "content." It’s a movie-within-a-movie-about-a-movie, but don’t let the meta-layers scare you off; at its heart, it’s just a very funny, very grumpy hug.

I watched this while wearing a pair of itchy wool socks that I definitely should have thrown away three years ago, which felt oddly appropriate for a film about the discomfort of clinging to things that no longer quite fit. Nanni Moretti stars as Giovanni, a director whose life is currently a Venn diagram of impending disasters. He’s filming a serious drama about the Italian Communist Party’s reaction to the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, his producer-wife Paola (Margherita Buy) is secretly seeing a therapist to figure out how to leave him, and his daughter is dating a man old enough to remember the actual 1956 uprising.

The Algorithm vs. The Auteur

If you want to understand why this film matters now, look no further than the scene where Giovanni meets with Netflix executives. In a world of franchise saturation and "bingeable" storytelling, this sequence is a comedic masterclass in cultural clashing. The executives—played with chilling, polished blankness—talk about "the hook," "the arc," and the fact that their product is "distributed in 190 countries."

Watching Moretti blink in confusion as they explain that his film needs a "slow-burn" opening is like watching a master watchmaker being told his gears are too complicated for a digital age. Netflix executives are the new Horsemen of the Apocalypse, at least in Giovanni’s eyes. It’s a biting satire of our current streaming-dominated reality, where the nuance of a Hungarian circus stranded in Rome is less important than whether a teenager in Ohio will scroll past the thumbnail.

The film captures that specific "Contemporary Cinema" anxiety: the fear that the theatrical experience and the auteur’s vision are being flattened by the Volume (those giant LED screens) and the almighty Algorithm. Giovanni is a man who stops a completely different director's film shoot just to argue for hours about the ethics of a single shot of violence. He’s annoying, pedantic, and utterly right, making him the perfect proxy for every cinephile who misses the days when movies were allowed to be "difficult."

A Circus of Broken Dreams

The "movie-within-the-movie" involves Ennio (Silvio Orlando) and Vera (Barbora Bobuľová), two actors playing communists whose world is shattered when Soviet tanks roll into Budapest. This could have been a dry historical slog, but Moretti infuses it with a whimsical, almost Fellini-esque energy. The Hungarian circus, complete with elephants and acrobats, provides a surreal backdrop to the political hand-wringing.

Silvio Orlando is fantastic here, channeling a weary dignity that anchors the more absurd comedic beats. The chemistry between Moretti and Margherita Buy (who has played his wife or ex in several films, most notably The Son's Room) is lived-in and heartbreaking. You can see the decades of shared history in the way they argue about a brand of shoes or a script change. It’s a reminder that while Giovanni is mourning the death of his political ideals and his cinematic style, he’s also losing the woman who made those things possible.

The comedic timing is vintage Moretti. He uses long, rhythmic sequences—often involving singing along to Italian pop songs in a car—to let the audience settle into his headspace. It’s slow-burn comedy that relies on your familiarity with his "grumpy old man" persona. If you’ve seen his earlier work like Dear Diary, this feels like a victory lap; if you haven't, it’s a brilliant introduction to a filmmaker who treats his own neuroses like a fine wine.

The Art of the Comeback

Despite its $13 million budget, A Brighter Tomorrow struggled to find a massive audience outside the festival circuit and its native Italy, making it a bit of a "forgotten" gem from the 2023 slate. It’s a victim of the very thing it parodies: a mid-budget, subtitled, intellectual comedy trying to survive in a sea of legacy sequels and CGI spectacles.

However, the film’s ending—which I won’t spoil—is one of the most joyous things I’ve seen in years. It’s a defiant, technicolor middle finger to pessimism. Nanni Moretti suggests that maybe, just maybe, if we keep marching, keep dancing, and keep refusing to accept "content" as a substitute for art, we might actually find that brighter tomorrow.

It isn't an "instant classic" in the sense that it changes the language of cinema, but it is an essential piece of contemporary commentary. It asks what we lose when we stop being difficult, when we stop caring about the ethics of a camera angle, and when we start making movies for 190 countries instead of for the person sitting next to us in the dark.

This is a film for anyone who has ever felt out of step with the modern world. It’s a comedy that understands that sometimes you have to laugh because the alternative—admitting that the world has moved on without you—is far too sad. Grab a coffee, ignore your phone’s notifications, and let Moretti remind you why we fell in love with the big screen in the first place. It’s a messy, musical, communist, circus-filled delight that earns every minute of its runtime.