The Hand of God

An untidy tapestry of stories set in Naples, Italy during the 1980s as a teen navigates his weird, sometimes wonderful, sometimes wretched family and his own future.

Near the end of “The Hand of God” the protagonist, a teen stand-in for writer/director Paolo Sorrentino, meets with an irascible filmmaker who challenges him that he doesn’t need to go to Rome to make movies, because there so many stories he can draw from his home city of Naples.

If this event really happened, then Sorrentino took the advice to heart, because his new movie is not one story but many, untidily woven together into a tapestry that’s chaotic but warmhearted.

There are many tantalizing threads that we could follow, but in the end don’t pick a single one to a degree that satisfies.