Starring Michael Caine (Ballinger) and Harvey Keitel (Boyle) as a composer and film director respectively, both men ponder a last hurrah as they reach the end of their careers.The reviewer from Seven Days loved it - — "How the hell did Paolo Sorrentino's latest not dominate awards season? Spotlight and The Big Short are timely films. Youth is timeless.
The Italian writer-director's is easily on a par with his 2013 masterpiece The Great Beauty. That picture earned the Foreign Language Film Oscar, so it's particularly baffling that this sumptuous follow-up was overlooked and underestimated."
Uncut was also impressed both with the acting and the sumptuous cinematography - "Beneath its luxurious surface, bubble themes of regret. The tone is wistful, as Ballinger and Boyle consider lost loves, lost time and encroaching old age. Boyle is working on a script – his “moral testament” – while Ballinger reflects on his wife’s sad decline into Altzheimer's. “Being young makes everything close," he says. "Being old makes everything far away."
"Caine is terrific – inscrutable and distant, but evidently there are depths behind his oversized horn-rimmed glasses. The sense of dry, wintry pathos is superb. It’s great to see him doing such good work, and you wish he'd do more of it. A late arriving cameo from Jane Fonda, as a fading Hollywood star, suddenly breaks the mood of languid introspection, but is in keeping with Sorrentino’s penchant for grotesque characters – and is, critically, very funny."