Those Were the Days

From its charmingly retro credits through its Third Man atmospherics to its bingo-bongo decade-collapsing climax, Youth Without Youth is a cinematic time machine — at once sillier and more desperate in its convictions than such kindred trips to the mystic East as Bertolucci's Little Buddha or Scorsese's Kundun. Variety has predicted Youth Without Youth will translate as cinemas without audiences, as if that were the point. 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."