- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
75This film's playful visual language pulls you in rather than shuts you out; it isn't difficult to decipher, and it enables Coppola and his editor, Walter Murch, to navigate the story's many realms with a directness and dexterity that are refreshing.
-
70Half the time in the mystical saga Youth Without Youth, I had no idea what the movie was about, but I always felt that the director and screenwriter, Francis Ford Coppola, did, and that he was deeply in tune--and having a hell of a time--with the material.
-
70For all its fussy lighting, upside-down camera angles, and overwrought impressionism, Youth Without Youth is essentially playful. It's also pleasantly meandering in its largely faked locations, and drolly matter-of-fact about its mystic visions.
-
70In this film Mr. Coppola blurs dreams and everyday life and suggests that through visual and narrative experimentation he has begun the search for new ways of making meaning, new holy places for him and for us. He may not have found them yet, but, then, he's just waking up.
-
67Tt is a comeback, and if it leads the director to better work, it can be forgiven as a warm-up.
-
67Beautiful but empty.
-
63Too much of the film is a muddle, and it feels like work, not play.
-
63As a fan and well-wisher of Coppola's, I wanted very much to like this movie, and I'll probably give it another shot once the DVD comes out. But, at first sight, Youth Without Youth's striving for exuberance reveals an almost desperate effort too much of the time.
-
63How's this for a ringing endorsement: Watching Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola's first film in nearly a decade, is like taking a philosophy exam. A really tiring philosophy exam, where the questions are elegantly phrased but damn confounding and not really conducive to right answers.
-
60Ultimately, Youth Without Youth is more intriguing than it is satisfying. It hooks you, then lets you flounder.
-
58In the context of Coppola's life and career, the film has a searching intelligence and ambition that can't be entirely dismissed; with his own money and nobody looking over his shoulder, Coppola has gone uprriver again in an effort to reinvent himself and cinema in the process. He ultimately fails, but he can't be faulted for trying.
-
50I understood two words of Youth Without Youth: "The End."
-
50Lush and heartfelt, but compelling only in fits and starts.
-
50Coppola's awkward screenplay never finds its tone -- or perhaps it deliberately evokes the pulp conventions of WWII adventures, horror films, weepy melodrama, psychological mysteries and superhero origin stories as a way of evoking the fundamental artificiality of the cinema. Either way, it never comes together into a cohesive whole, and is seriously undermined by Roth's morose performance.
-
50An ambitious but mind-numbingly tedious and often incomprehensible film.
-
50At its best, the movie's crazy in unexpected and poetic ways; at its worst, merely preposterous.
-
50A vast, lumbering white elephant of a movie--but I sort of love it.
-
40Lacking coherence and suspense, the picture is likely to attract a cult following while disappointing Coppola's fan base.
-
40Not quite a complete write-off, but basically a folly.
-
40Attempting to harness multiple genres, pic is brought down by ponderous dialogue (much of it dubbed) and an inability to connect with its characters.
-
40The essence of Youth Without Youth, which was shot -- luminously -- in Romania, lies in its solemn speculations about aging, time and consciousness. Mr. Coppola is one of the cinema's peerless masters, and I would have enjoyed nothing more than a chance to celebrate his new film. I'm truly sorry to say, then, that I found it impenetrable.
-
40Unfortunately, "Youth" becomes so lost in its own conceptual, convoluted vortex, it becomes virtually incomprehensible. Coppola proves that even the best of our film artists can lose sight of what this medium is all about: entertaining, enlightening and including its audience.
-
40I'm all for bold screwiness, but this provocation seems labored despite the striking images.
-
38The film is a sharp disappointment to those who have been waiting for 10 years since the master's last film. The best that can be hoped is that, having made a film, Coppola has the taste again, and will go on to make many more, nothing like this.
-
38Whatever it was in Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade's novella Youth Without Youth that drew Francis Coppola out of a 10-year retirement to make a movie, the result is the year's most bizarre novelty item.
-
30Coppola never manages to get his themes to coalesce into anything terribly coherent.
-
25Most certainly a personal work -- so personal, in fact, that I can't imagine anyone but Coppola being able to sit through it.
-
0The movie is one soporific, depressed, deadeningly vague scene after another.
-
0It's merely nutty, a picture that appears to have been made by an individual who has fallen off the edge of reason. Watching it was misery.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 6 out of 12
-
Mixed: 2 out of 12
-
Negative: 4 out of 12
-
ZakiyaK10
-
ChadS.4
-
10