Francesca Bertini was, and now is again, one of the most arresting, smouldering-eyed presences of Italian cinema. The Last Diva is a tribute to her at ninety (plus or minus)...the sharp old lady of the celluloid camellias....Gianfranco Mingozzi's cunning documentary ends with a clip from Sunset Boulevard, and certainly Bertini is in the high-octane class of Norma Desmond and Gloria Swanson. But there's nothing about her that's out of control....What we see here is Bertini in one of her greatest hits, Assunta Spina (1915), and in Odette (1934), directed by Marcel L'Herbier. The former (which she says she directed herself) is a melodrama shot in a rather stiff but still appealing forerunner of the neorealist style. The latter is a part Bertini had played nineteen years before, so Mingozzi shows her looking at both versions. The Last Diva is a fascinating piece of history and a reminder that Italian movies in the age of Griffith had a life and inventiveness that inspired Birth of a Nation.-David Thomson, SFIFF '84