This chronicle of the remarkable career of Italian political titan Giulio Andreotti is a film that needs to be seen twice: once to take in the wealth of historical detail, and again to marvel in the bravura brilliance of Paolo Sorrentino's direction. The rock on which Italy's Christian Democracy was founded and a prime minister many times over, Andreotti was ruthlessly ambitious and pitilessly pragmatic in the pursuit of power and personal accomplishment. However, his true genius lay in extricating himself from potentially ruinous scandals. With charges of corruption, criminal complicity and murder failing to stick, he remained at the top of Italian politics until the tangentopoli investigations of the early 1990s when the links between the Mafia and the political system were fully exposed. It's this episode that brings out the best in Sorrentino and star Toni Servillo (Gomorra), who conveys throughout the chilling sense of conviction and unremitting determination of an experienced political operator.

Italy, early '90s. Calm, clever and inscrutable, politician Giulio Andreotti has been synonymous with power for decades. He has survived everything: electoral battles, terrorist massacres, loss of friends, slanderous accusations; but now certain repentant mobsters implicate him in the crimes of Cosa Nostra.