Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Year Released: 2015
Rating: 2.0
A composer (Michael Caine) is staying at a secluded resort in Switzerland - along with his daughter (Rachel Weisz), a filmmaker friend (Harvey Keitel), a jaded actor (Paul Dano) and a former soccer star (Rolly Serrano) - when he gets a visit from an emissary for the Queen of England asking him to perform a concert for her: he refuses, but the Queen doesn't like to be told "no." Essentially a series of vignettes about aging, with many parts just excuses for the characters to offer up sometimes banal, sometimes extremely poignant commentary on the problems with getting older and regret (Caine cannot get over the fact that Keitel may have slept with a woman he loved; Dano regrets one movie role that was bad but profitable), except the pieces never mesh into a cohesive and poignant whole (Keitel's impromptu suicide plays more like a glib joke than a moment of desperation ... or maybe that's the intent). It does not disappoint from a visual aspect (Sorrentino's regular cinematographer Luca Bigazzi shot it) - the sequence with Caine drowning in the Piazza San Marco is remarkable - but is every movie by the director going to be him (lazily) appropriating Fellini (which he started doing with The Great Beauty)?
