Metacritic reviews

Youth is a voluptuary’s feast, a full-body immersion in the sensory pleasures of the cinema.

Paolo Sorrentino, with Youth, delivers his most tender film to date, an emotionally rich contemplation of life’s wisdom gained, lost and remembered — with cynicism harping from the sidelines, but as a wearied chord rather than a major motif.

Youth has some significant points on frustration of fame, ageism and our natural inclination to lose perspective, but it’s primarily about finding peace and happiness in your life. That may sound painfully obvious. It may even sound cliché. But somehow Sorrentino is able to fashion the film's diverse elements into an emotional narrative that makes it all feel fresh and new. And that’s truly worth celebrating.

The wry, flamboyant cinematic opera of Paolo Sorrentino reaches new heights of showy, utterly tasteful magnificence in Youth.

With each new twist, Sorrentino is always one step ahead of his audience, building a narrative that skips along at an enthralling pace.

The film is often remarkable, gorgeous even - many of the shots in Youth would make excellent closing shots, including the opening shot - and funny. It's a work of wonderful moments, but it's less than momentous and, significantly, you'll never believe a single word of it. This is a pity as the performances are excellent.

Youth has a wan eloquence and elegance, though freighted with sentimentality and a strangely unearned and uninteresting macho-geriatric regret for lost time, lost film projects, lost love and all those beautiful women that you never got to sleep with.

There are lightning-flashes of pure, ornamental brilliance throughout Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, although there’s not much happening on the landscape they illuminate.

There is no shading, there is no ambiguity, and while there are observations and stilted epithets aplenty, there is precious little wisdom.

As ever, Paolo Sorrentino ironically cuts the legs out from under his protagonists' wistfulness with grotesquerie.