Sightlines · reception

How There's Still Tomorrow was received

2023 · Paola Cortellesi · There's Still Tomorrow on Sightlines

The arc

It didn't need a reappraisal — it opened the 2023 Rome Film Festival and promptly became Italy's biggest film of the year, out-selling Barbie and Oppenheimer in Italian cinemas. What shifted was its meaning: within weeks it went from box-office fairy tale to national civic event, the film everyone in Italy was suddenly required to have an opinion on.

What’s debated

The fights are over the twist ending — masterstroke or cop-out? — and over whether staging domestic violence with stylized, almost choreographed grace is a brilliant distancing device or too tasteful for its subject.

Its footprint

In Italy it became shorthand for the national conversation about domestic violence and femicide, with schools organizing mass screenings for students; its release collided with a femicide case that gripped the country, making the film feel less like a movie than a rallying point.

Where it stands

A canon climber at full sprint — a black-and-white directorial debut that became one of the highest-grossing Italian films ever and the rare recent Italian film international Letterboxd users treat as required viewing.

Did you know? It was Paola Cortellesi's directorial debut — and it sold more tickets in Italy in 2023 than Barbie (around 4.3 million admissions), landing among the top ten highest-grossing Italian films of all time.

Named by the director

• Campo de' fiori (The Peddler and the Lady) (1943) — Cortellesi cited it (and Anna Magnani's films of that era) as inspiration for her portrait of working-class Roman women.
• Anna Magnani — Cortellesi named Magnani — especially in Rome, Open City — as her reference point for the strong Roman matriarchs of the period.