Youth Without Youth

Legendary director Francis Ford Coppola returns to the director's chair after a ten-year hiatus with this adaptation of Romanian author Mircea Eliade's tome detailing the arduous journey of a professor whose life is thrown into chaos as World War II looms ominously on the horizon. When the ...more

Youth Without Youth is a seductive piece of filmmaking. Rife with meaty philosophical material, its cinematography cast in gorgeous sepia tones at times, it practically begs for intellectual and artistic praise but doesn’t fulfill its grandiose promise. The film marks Francis Ford Coppola’s first directorial attempt since 1997’s The Rainmaker, over a decade since the dramedy fluff of Jack and decades after his ‘70s renaissance, a long and deliberate hiatus that begs Coppola devotees to ask how ...more

Though widely accused of narrative impenetrability and blasted by critics as "excruciating" to sit through, Francis Ford Coppola's mystical period drama Youth Without Youth in fact suffers from neither problem; the narrative itself (bizarre though it is) feels relatively straightforward and easy to ascertain, and the top-drawer performances by lead Tim Roth and others make it relatively painless (even pleasurable, for those open to a challenge) to sit through. The film suffers from a crippling ...more