One out of Five stars
Running time: 124 mins

Pretentious, boring and nigh on incomprehensible, this is easily one of the worst films of the year.

What's it all about?
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola and based on a deservedly obscure novella by Romanian author Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth stars Tim Roth as 70-year-old scientist Dominic Matei, who receives a new lease of life, literally, when he gets struck by lightning in 1938 Bucharest. Rejuvenated and with a super-sized brain, Dominic embarks on a scientific quest involving language and time, falling in love with the beautiful Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara, from Control) along the way.

However, Dominic's lightning-based incident also comes to the attention of the Nazis and soon Dominic and Veronica are forced to go on the run. In addition, Dominic discovers he has a series of superpowers such as mind control and the ability to absorb knowledge through touch.

The Bad
Clearly you can have good What the hell is going on? movies (e.g. Southland Tales, Hotel Haribati) and you can have bad ones. Youth Without Youth is definitely one of the bad ones, which is a shame, because you'd think you wouldn't be able to go too far wrong with a film that had both Nazis and mind control in it.

Francis Ford "The Godfather" Coppola hasn't made a movie since 1997's The Rainmaker and he appears to have forgotten how in the interim. The plot is utterly nonsensical, the pacing is extremely slow, the dialogue is either boring or laughable and the cinematography is so murky that it's often hard to see what's going on.

The Worst
Roth does his best under the circumstances but the plot is so infuriatingly pretentious and tedious that it's difficult to care and you soon give up trying to work out what's going on.

Worth seeing?
In short, Youth Without Youth is one of the worst films of the year and it's hard to believe that the same director made both The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. A massive disappointment, to be avoided at all costs.