This Must Be the Place

Directed by Paolo Sorrentino

(R)

**

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In a film most notable for its “splendid strangeness,” the “consummate oddness and utter sincerity” of Sean Penn’s lead performance is the headline draw, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Outfitted in full Gothic regalia and adopting a “high, whispery, and fussily precise” voice, Penn perfectly embodies a 1980s rocker who resists conventional middle age. Currently living in Ireland in quiet domesticity with his wife (Frances McDormand), he helps give the early scenes “a low-key comic vibe” before the story takes up a bunch of other concerns. What happens next “feels like a terrible fit,” said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. When this “trembling Goth” learns that his father has died in the U.S., he travels there to hunt down an Auschwitz guard who was his father’s tormentor. Still, the road trip that results does provide its own pleasures, said Sheri Linden in the Los Angeles Times. If this movie “doesn’t entirely get past its hard-to-buy premise,” Italian director Paolo Sorrentino at least has the courage of his convictions, “spinning many of the story’s contrivances into moments of strange, aching beauty.”