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100It is a luxury to be enveloped in a good film.
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100A major cinema event of the year, a masterpiece of Italian film traditions in social/political realism and historical family epic.
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100This is epic filmmaking on a profoundly human scale, directed to perfection and magnificently acted by everyone in sight.
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100So in-depth, so appealing, so easy to sit through and so anomalously grand scale that few who see it will ever forget it.
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100In exchange for a small piece of your life, you receive an infinity.
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100Like a great novel from a more expansive bygone age, The Best of Youth is full of big thoughts; like a great soap opera, it's also full of sharp plot turns, vibrant characters, and great talk. It is, in short, the best of cinema.
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100Giordana's redemptive vision provides a sense of discovery and a well of hope in the most devastating of troubles, and beautiful surprises in love, friendship and family.
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100Those who see it will, quite frankly, not believe their luck. It is that satisfying, that engrossing, that good.
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100Smart, generous, as subtle as it is expansive, this is storytelling of a rare order. Six hours may seem like a big investment, but the emotional pay-back is beyond price.
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90This is a graceful and enveloping feat of filmmaking.
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90And like all great family sagas, The Best of Youth, while tipping its hat to the painful confusion of living life forward, reels it backward to give it the thrilling significance of time and place.
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90The Best of Youth doesn't have a boring millisecond. It isn't an art film, with longueurs; it's a mini-series with the sweep of a classic novel, with tons of plot.
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90At nearly six hours, pic's extreme length lets Giordana and screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli build up a novelistic rhythm, pulling the audience so deeply and forcefully into their story that it becomes like a enveloping dream; when it's over, parting with the characters is truly sweet and sorrowful.
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90The Best of Youth takes its chance--almost unheard of, these days--to bloom and unfurl like a novel.
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90The story unfolds at such length and over so many years that politics tend to fade into the wallpaper, leaving an exceptionally rich family story.
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88The acting is electric. By the end of this haunting, hypnotic film, you feel you have watched lives being lived, not just imagined.
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88After all the observations on heartache, politics, art, commerce, passion, identity, mortality, even mental health, six hours begin to seem downright compact.
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88A slowly flowering miracle: an epic of normal life.
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80Lo Cascio and Boni inhabit their roles with keen intellectual and emotional vigor.
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80Rarely have six hours spent doing ANYTHING seemed so rewarding.
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80A big, family-style Italian dinner, catered to the broadest tastes, yet satisfying all the same.
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80The movie has the addictive episodic intimacy of great TV.
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Eminently watchable, The Best of Youth nonetheless lacks the devastating emotional gut punch of its obvious inspiration, Visconti's "Rocco and His Brothers."
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80Full of nuance and complexity, but it is also as accessible and engrossing as a grand 19th-century novel.
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80Works as both historical allegory and moving family drama.
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80Like some wines, The Best of Youth travels well. From its earliest moments the film is intelligently seen.
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75All the pieces converge in a powerful rush during the second half.
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75If you've got six hours to invest watching superior television in a movie theatre, then spend the time wisely with The Best of Youth.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 68 out of 77
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Mixed: 6 out of 77
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Negative: 3 out of 77
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AlanL10
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RobertL10
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CristinaA10Gripping, wonderful story, great acting. I didn't want it to end.