Youth Without Youth: Critic Reviews

The movie is one soporific, depressed, deadeningly vague scene after another.

Youth Without Youth is a narratively ambitious, visually sumptuous surrealist enterprise that tries to bend time and space together as neatly as the folds in an origami swan.

A long, mad film of plonking and studenty intellectualism.

The craftsmanship is undeniably polished. It's just too bad the story is so plodding and pretentious.

Unfortunately, Youth becomes so lost in its own conceptual, convoluted vortex, it becomes virtually incomprehensible.

This is hardly Coppola's greatest movie, but it's far from his worst -- its bid for a new beginning is one from the heart.

The year's most bizarre novelty item.

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.

Coppola takes a subject that once would have made him gaga and explores it with tenderness and lucidity.

Youth Without Youth proves that Francis Ford Coppola can still make a movie, but not that he still knows how to choose his projects.

Too much of the film is a muddle, and it feels like work, not play.

I'm all for bold screwiness, but this provocation seems labored despite the striking images.

Youth Without Youth is so beautiful, in fact, that it almost transcends the epic bunkum of Coppola's script. But almost doesn't count, even when it is uttered in ancient tongues.

Francis Ford Coppola's first movie in 10 years is a technically dazzling work, but humanly a bewildering one.

A terrible mess of mystical mumbo jumbo, but you have to give Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth this: It is one magnificent and interesting failure of a film.

Francis Ford Coppola's first film in 10 years deserves serious attention, but this massive dose of Nembutal only manages to render you too comatose to think.

Youth Without Youth is well worth seeing.

Youth Without Youth will translate to cinemas without audiences.

I don't want to say this thing is complicated, but Tom Stoppard just called to beg for an explanation.... I apologize for all the elements I'm leaving out, but my editor ordered me to keep this piece under 40 million words.

Not so much a bad movie as a dispiritingly unnecessary one (especially by a once-great director), Youth Without Youth ultimately boils down to a long, autumn stroll around the block to a place everyone winds up at some time or another.

How'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.

While a movie doesn't have to make literal sense to be good, a filmmaker can't be so lost in his own universe that he forgets his job is to open it out to the rest of us. And that, apparently, is what has happened to Coppola here.

The movie has been labeled 'stilted,' 'soporific,' and 'a pretentious, meandering mess.' But you certainly couldn't call it conventional, predictable, or pandering. This film is stubbornly, almost insanely, itself.

Handsomely made on a low budget, the film has the polished look of a Coppola film with expert contributions from some master craftsmen. But the story is full of arcane references that many will find nonsensical, and the performances are a letdown.

An incomprehensible, pretentious, meandering mess -- so self-serious, it's laughable.