A DVD review from The Movie Snob:

Cinema Paradiso (the director's cut) (B). I had never seen this movie before I borrowed the DVD from a friend, and I skipped past the original 2-hour theatrical release and went straight to the almost 3-hour director's cut. In the new version, the movie breaks down nicely into three parts of about an hour each. In Part I the protagonist, Salvatore di Vita (nicknamed "Toto"), is a very young boy growing up fatherless in post-WWII Sicily. He is captivated by the movies at the town's theater, the Cinema Paradiso, and the projectionist Alfredo becomes a surrogate father to him. Fast forward to Part II, in which Toto is now a young man and falls madly in love with the fair Elena, a girl from a rather better family than Toto. Then, in Part III, Salvatore is well into middle age and has become a successful movie director himself. He returns to his hometown for the first time in years for Alfredo's funeral (no spoiler here; you find out Alfredo has died in the opening moments of the movie, and Parts I and II are all flashback), and he finds it full of memories and ghosts. I enjoyed the movie, but after the relatively light-hearted Parts I and II, Part III is surprisingly disturbing and sad in turn. I glanced at the original version and found that Part III had been cut to a very short, and not nearly so sad or disturbing, epilogue in the original theatrical release. If you're a fan of the original, the new version is going to make you look at the movie in a completely different way.