It is held that from the 1980s onwards Italian cinema found itself in crisis; among the reasons cited is the proliferation of private television channels, which drew the viewer's attention away from the cinemas, and as a consequence…

In 2007, during the Cannes Festival, Quentin Tarantino, a great admirer of Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, described the state of affairs in Italian film as tragic, because the work of recent years strikes him as samey, dreary and soul-destroying: "They are about either boys coming of age, or girls coming of age, or couples whose relationship is in crisis, or the holidays of the mentally retarded."

The unflattering words provoked a storm of indignation among Italian film people. The daily newspaper L'Unità called Tarantino "mentally retarded", while Sophia Loren wondered whether he was entitled to speak about Italian cinema when he understood nothing even of the American kind. There were, however, those who agreed with Tarantino, acknowledging a considerable grain of truth in the American's words.