Youth Without Youth is pretentious as hell but so goofily in love with the idea of itself that you feel protective toward it, the way you would toward a platypus that has lost its way.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 24, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 17, 2011

Coppola may be back, but he's a long way from being back on form.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 14, 2008

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.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 7, 2008

The suspicion that all this froth builds up towards nothing but some poetic imagery is inexorably realized and sours the magic of the second half of the film.

| Original Score: C- | Jan 29, 2008

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.

| Original Score: C | Jan 11, 2008

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

| Jan 10, 2008

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.

Full Review | Jan 4, 2008

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.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 4, 2008

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.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 4, 2008

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

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 21, 2007

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

| Dec 21, 2007

Meandering and often incomprehensible.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 21, 2007

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

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 21, 2007

Youth Without Youth is well worth seeing.

Full Review | Dec 19, 2007

Francis Ford Coppola's first film in a decade is perhaps the most complex, exasperating and challenging material he's ever directed.

Full Review | Dec 17, 2007

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.

| Dec 14, 2007

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.

Full Review | Dec 14, 2007

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 14, 2007

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

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 14, 2007