Review: Under the volcano, a city converses with its past in the haunting 'Pompei: Below the Clouds'

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In Naples, Italy, the past isn’t relegated to what’s behind us.In its crumbled, ancient majesty, the past is quite visible.

And when it comes to the legacy of Mount Vesuvius — able to change the sky and move the earth — history encompasses all that’s above and plenty that’s subterranean, too.The notion of Naples as a place in perpetual contact with its ghostly, grand history, whether you’re a citizen living on top of it or a visitor passing through, is what gives Gianfranco Rosi’s patient, eccentric documentary “Pompei: Below the Clouds” its strangely beautiful atmosphere of reflection and restlessness.Like a cagey docent who would rather guide your attention than talk your ear off, Rosi (“Fire at Sea”) trusts your own curiosity, in turn bringing thoughtful life to this city portrait of people and places.The result — from the tunnels carved out by tomb robbers to the trains that run day and night — is a cinematic gift for the senses and specifically, to paraphrase one of the more philosophical characters, about our understanding of time’s ability to both preserve and destroy.

Movies We’ve mapped out 27 of the best movie theaters in L.A., from the TCL Chinese and the New Beverly to the Alamo Drafthouse and which AMC reigns in Burbank.Shot in richly textured black and white with a fixed camera, Rosi makes the region’s present look as if it’s always teetering on the edge of a haunting archival status.He returns often to an empty, dilapidated cinema projecting the past (snatches of the silent “The Last Days of Pompeii,” Rossellini’s “Journey to Italy” and older documentaries) as if seeking kinship with earlier chroniclers.

And maybe to gently remind us that moviegoing is as endangered by shifting sensibilities as are people who live in the shadow of a volcano, one whose AD 79 eruption is a civilizational marker nobody there can truly es...