Youth Without Youth, 12/5.

"[P]retend Youth Without Youth, [Francis Ford] Coppola's first film in a decade, is by a filmmaker without [his] past," suggests Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "It's fairly exciting. It's the kind of film that frequently inspires with its inventive storytelling in the same way that Silent Light and No Country for Old Men do - films by directors feverish with ideas, who are also at the top of their craft, and know how to balance audacity with restraint.... It's [the] balance of baroque élan and classical sensibility that makes the film something of a marvel."

Updated through 12/7.

"'They always play The Godfather [theme] when I come down at these things,' said Francis Ford Coppola, looking jovial and scruffy in colorful layers last night at a screening of his new movie Youth Without Youth at the Paris Theater. 'I beg the audience to let me move on, find new ways of expressing myself.'" Gillian Reagan reports for the New York Observer.

The Reeler's ST VanAirsdale was there, too: "Legitimately independent and utterly impenetrable, Youth follows the travails of 70-year-old linguist Dominic Matei (Tim Roth), whose life's search for the source of human language is interrupted by a broken engagement, a lightning strike that restores him to his 35-year-old self, Nazis chasing him as the planet's most coveted specimen, the return of his lost love (Alexandra Maria Lara) in the form of another lighting-addled atavist who relapses into Sanskrit and Sumerian when not aging at a rate of a year per day. Do they share a curse, or is it all just a dream? Moreover, as the first hour's exposition folds into the second hour's metaphysics, do you get it? Do you even care?"

Related online listening: Coppola's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Update, 12/6: James Mottram talks with Roth for the London Times.

Updates, 12/7: "Given the parallels that Francis Ford Coppola draws freely and eagerly between his own career and that of the fictional character at the center of his new film Youth Without Youth, it's difficult to not also notice the aptness of the title," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "Oh, to be young again - but it's only a movie."

"Any return by Coppola to personal filmmaking is to be applauded, even if that applause has to compete with incredulous laughter," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "[T]his is an intensely silly film, but its silliness is bound up with the good stuff - the lushness and idealism, the cinematic grandeur. Many fantastical things happen in the picture, but Coppola and his visionary editor-cum-sound designer Walter Murch keep faith with old-school techniques."

Posted by dwhudson at December 5, 2007 1:16 PM