Forever Young

The film’s slight scattershot structure actually works in its favour, keeping the pace at a full-tilt sprint, the energy sparking and the story moving whenever there’s a risk of it tipping into the realms of the overwrought.

An autobiographical portrait that somehow leaves you knowing less about the subject at hand, and a study of actors, warts and all, that offers little insight into the artistic process.

It’s always watchable, and it has a distinctively grainy, intimate look, but the vague, generic characters and incidents are the kind of thing you might scribble on the back of an envelope without having done any research at all.

It is this direct line to the characters that keeps the film relatively interesting, even as it does become rather exhausting to watch these very kooky and carefree young people gallivanting about.

It’s a sweet but oddly circumspect film, ruled by a friction between warring demands: the allure of wistful memories and the rigor of complex appraisal.

Epically tiresome. ... What is exasperating about the film is its reluctance to dramatise the teaching: to show the young people themselves simply getting better at acting.

[Bruni Tedeschi] fails to make much of a case for why any of it should resonate with anyone outside this tiny, hermetically enclosed community. ... [An] indulgent, histrionic personal history.