Youth (2015)

Youth showed up at the end of the year, upending my carefully calibrated top ten lists with a kaleidoscope of cinematic magic, an overtly theatrical drama about what it means to make a life, in which Michael Caine plays a composer in unhappy twilight reminiscence. Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino has been trying for years to inherit the mantle created by Federico Fellini, and he has now made it his own with this circus of extravagant compassion. It's like an all you can eat buffet filled with as many emotional beats a psychological kitchen could conjure: grief and regret, imaginative impulses, romance and lust, cruelty and kindness. Caine gives his greatest and perhaps most uncomfortable performance. (He's very ably helped by Harvey Keitel, Paul Dano, and Jane Fonda.) It's not entirely clear what it all means, but it's not that kind of film. This is cinema of the heart, of the sensations; sounds and images and representations of people inviting us to see ourselves—to feel our own regret, our own hope—in them.