Youth

In his early 80s, Michael Caine makes the first and possibly only true art house movie of his career, starring here as Fred Ballinger, a veteran conductor on holiday at an Alpine health spa. Ballinger is being pursued by an emissary from Buckingham Palace: the Queen would like Ballinger to come out of retirement for one last performance, but the musician refuses, citing personal reasons. From here, the film becomes a surreal and at times even psychedelic study of Ballinger's life as he is confronted by his past - in the shape of his daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz) and film-maker best friend Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) - while making acidic observations about the present. Caine makes hay with a soulful role that brings his playful, world-weary charm to the fore, but this is really a playground for Italian maestro Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty), whose ear for music is quite extraordinary and whose visual genius effortlessly takes us from the absurd to the profound.