Review of Youth (2015) by Aliceofx — 04 Dec 2015

All dressed up and nowhere to go. Paolo Sorrentino's previous film The Great Beauty was among my favourites of 2013. Youth has much of its style, but none of its substance. It certainly looked gorgeous, but left me feeling empty and unfulfilled.

The film talks a lot about emotions but it never creates them, just endlessly philosophises about them. Its characters remain not so subtle metaphors, but never real people.

There's nothing particularly wrong about Youth and at times it is quite enjoyable, its sin is in not achieving greatness which for a drama of this type is an absolute failure. It wants to be a grand statement about life but has nothing meaningful to say. It is still very watchable, specially if you like films of this type. Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel are what makes it so with their fun portrayal of old friends. Beyond that there's not much else that has stuck to my mind about the film. Overall Youth is not a bad film, but there's nothing recommendable about it.