Friends since childhood, 80-year-olds Fred and Mick have grown up together and are now sharing sweet suffering during a vacation at a luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps, where they come to frequently. A famous composer and conductor who categorically refuses to come out of retirement, Fred is visited by his daughter and personal assistant Lena, who is fraught by an imminent divorce. A director and screenwriter, Mick is co-writing a new movie with several passionate youngsters, a film he considers his testament to cinema, and which he hopes to make together with the actress he helped make famous. But the passing time makes each decision harder to take and each memory harder to stand.

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Since 2004, Paolo Sorrentino has been given a special pass for the Cannes Film Festival, where each of his movies has been shown in the official competition but has never won. Youth continues along the same line. Boosted by a Best Foreign Film Oscar for The Great Beauty last year, the Italian director has moved on to his second English-language film (after This Must Be The Place with Sean Penn), one that will delight his fans without impressing his detractors. But despite having a wonderful touch for mise en scène that verges on mannerism and a taste for pretentiousness that threatens to take the energy out of his characters, Youth is a great movie, in turn funny and tragic, that is irresistibly sincere and moving. This is in great part due to Michael Caine, whose thoughtful, superb performance refocuses the energy of the movie, and to the rest of the four-star cast – Harvey Keitel, Rachel Weisz, Paul Dano and Jane Fonda.