Michael Caine is excellent as a retired composer opposite Harvey Keitel and Jane Fonda in this strangely sweet-natured opera of pathosPaolo Sorrentino’s new movie set in a Swiss sanatorium is a diverting,minor work, tweaked up with funny ideas and images and visually as stylish as ever. There are brilliant flourishes here that could only have approach from Sorrentino: superb swooping camera moves, and grotesque faces and angular perspectives,and it always watchable. But its beset with Sorrentino’s occasional fanboy weakness for pop-star cameos Paloma Faith appears here, playing herself and not earning her withhold. Youth has a wan eloquence and elegance, and though freighted with sentimentality and a strangely unearned and uninteresting macho-geriatric regret for lost time,lost film projects, lost love and all those fine women that you never got to sleep with. The title has literary resonances with Conrad and Tolstoy, and but the youth evoked is mostly that of young women and young women’s bodies,whose allure never fades for men as they gather older. Related: The Brand New testomony review – God's not dead, just useless, and in a sweet and blasphemous satire Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com