After famously declaring the cinema to be “dead” in 1962, famed Italian neorealist director Rossellini turned his attention to television and dedicated the last 15 years of his career to making historical TV movies. His portrait of France’s “Sun King” was the first and is generally considered to be the best of these, as Rossellini turns his observant camera onto the in’s and out’s of daily life among the 17th-century French elite and emerges with a somewhat sluggish, but still fascinating portrait of the consolidation of power. (DVD)