best movie i've ever seen.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This film is one of the best way to understand Italian culture and society, the passion, the crisis, the eternal political fight that Italy endures since forever... with the its peculiar contradictions that Dante Alighieri has described in the Commedia. La Meglio Gioventù helped me to perceive and analyze the peril my country ran during the period called "Anni di Piombo" (late 60s-late 70s), a bloody age where terrorist's acts and brutality of police force create a state of mind of continuing distress not only for protesters and officers, but for an entire society on the verge of a huge breakdown. It is a ray of light on a period of time I am to young to remember. It's an exploration of the truth, narrated by opposite and converging point of views. It's a big deal of value to a magnificent piece of art of filming, writing and acting. Hope this movie will be advised by teachers to students, by parents to sons and daughters, as they may be with a great piece of literature of all times.

Sometimes I really don't get it why some things are liked so much, by so many. This often is the case with certain mini-series and television work, like this movie. Fore I just really can't see this as an actual movie. In its setup it's certainly more suitable as a mini-series and also quality-wise it has very little to do with real film-making. And lets not forget about its running time. It's 6 hours long! No movie has the right to be that long really, unless you're Terrence Malick.I'm not saying that this production is an horrible one but it obviously for me was still a very disappointing one. Let me just say that whenever I would had seen the first part somewhere, sometime on TV, aired as a mini-series, I would have no intentions to tune in again to it the next week. Neither the story or characters are really interesting enough for that and besides the directing and visual approach to the movie is just too lacking.Seems to me that if the movie would had picked different characters and different story lines, people would had been just gushing as much over it as they do now. It wouldn't have mattered at all, just because it's long and Italian people seem to love it. Nothing about the story really stands out. It's lacking some good depth and multiple layers in it. The movie now instead remains a shallow experience, that really doesn't work effectively on an emotional or dramatic level.And funny thing is; I'm normally really fond of epic and long family drama's, or movies that chronicles the lifespan of a person(s).But like I said; this movie feels too much like it consists out of a bunch of soap opera scripts that got thrown together into one big long movie, when no television network picked it up as a soap opera. That unfortunately doesn't mean that this movie ever surpasses the level of an average and typical soap opera, with neither its story, characters, visual style or acting.This movie definitely looks like it got shot on video, which gives it an awful made for TV type of look. The camera-work, the lighting, the directing approach, it all got done so lifeless and without any imagination. There is absolutely no artistic value to this production, which is the reason why I think it's quite offensive that lots of people rank this just as high- and compare it to other epic Italian classics, by some great film-makers, like Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni or Federico Fellini, among many others.The story made all of the characters quite bland and uninteresting but you could also really blame some of the acting for that. I'm sorry but sometimes the performances just weren't good enough at all. Another reason why this movie failed to make an impact on me emotionally.But when you do take this- and look upon this as a TV production it still has some value and quality in it. Guess when you're really into soap opera's or overlong mini-series, you can still enjoy watching this, as either a movie or mini-series. 6/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

I liked this so well that my first reaction after having watched it was to go back and watch it again. And that is what I did. As with most any good movie, a second viewing is more rewarding than the first, particularly if reading subtitles has been required.It has been a long time since the heydays of Fellini, Bertolucci, or Antonioni, so it's good to see a quality Italian film come out that has international appeal. The ambitious scope of this film, covering the lives of a family from 1966 to 2003, well justifies its six hour length. The story concentrates on two brothers, Nicola and Matteo, who take quite different paths, with Nicola becoming a psychiatrist and Matteo a cop. In addition to the brothers we get to know their parents, siblings (two female), lovers, friends, and children. The number of characters is balanced, not too many to be confusing but enough to make things interesting.Director Giordana definitely has the eye of an artist. The movie is masterfully filmed throughout, and some scenes are so beautifully shot that you can only respond with a sense of awe. Consider the scenes that have Nicola wandering through a natural history museum with his daughter. The editing is flawless and the tracking shot from a distance that interposes various animals as the two walk along is brilliant. Or take the scene where Nicola is at the photography exhibit with large photos mounted on stands throughout the hall. This is where having the luxury of a relaxed time constraint pays off. Nicola wanders among the photos for some time before finding the one he is looking for. The mood of that scene makes us as anxious to find the sought after photo as Nicola is.I thought all the actors were effective and was particularly impressed with Sonia Bergamasco who plays Nicola's significant other Giulia. Camilla Filippi, who plays Nicola's daughter Sara as an adult, is most appealing. And it doesn't hurt that all of the young actors are physically attractive.The story is told in a linear fashion and it moves along seamlessly, which is a testament to the editing. I am sure that inter-cutting the lives of the various characters while supplying a backdrop of historical events was not easy. I particularly appreciated this as a counterpoint to the disjointed time sequencing and jump cuts adopted by so many current movies. I learned a good deal of recent Italian history from this movie, but the emphasis was always on the characters. The point is well made as to how much our lives are shaped by the larger social events of the time. I never understood before how turbulent things were in Italy during the time frame of this movie.I liked how many of the characters remained enigmatic. What prompted Giulia to become a member of the revolutionary Red Brigades, at the sacrifice of her family? Matteo is so complex and conflicted that I never figured him out. He could be sensitive but also subject to fits of anger. The only consistency in Matteo was his love for his brother, even though they were sometimes at odds. Matteo was prone to self-inflicted wounds--on a visit to Rome he sees his parents as he drives by them, but he does not stop; he makes a date with a girl but shows up only to follow her secretly in his car as she finally walks away. For all of Nicola's skills as a psychiatrist, in the end it is seen that he did not quite understand his brother either. This movie does not dazzle you with technique but rather seduces you into becoming involved with its story and its characters. Who can argue with a technique that accomplishes that?

I'm sorry to be doing this, and I won't blame you if you disregard my review because of it, but I'm basing my comments only on the first half of this six-hour film.Expecting much from this acclaimed and obviously beloved made-for-Italian-television miniseries, I instead finished the first half absolutely mystified at what people are responding to. The movie follows the stories of two very different but very close brothers whose lives take quite different directions: at the end of part I, one was a doctor dedicating himself to psychiatric institutional reform while the other was a military police officer. The film absolutely races through its plot; I'm not exaggerating when I say that if you leave the room for a minute without pausing the film you may come back to find that years have passed while you were gone. The storytelling is completely one-note; all incidents and events are told with the same uniform tone, so that the drama has no peaks and valleys, and none of it is compelling. Sure, a lot happens in terms of story, but I wasn't remotely engaged in any of it or in these characters. I'm sending the second half back unwatched, because there are too many other movies out there I want to see to muster up the energy or time to watch three more hours of this.I will give "The Best of Youth" the benefit of the doubt that it views better in its original format, as installments on T.V. Maybe the story would seem like it was taking its time a bit more if it were coming at you across a longer period of time, and maybe the static and boring film-making would come across better if you were watching it as a T.V. movie and not as a feature film. But that still doesn't make me like it any better.Grade: B-