WHAT a marvellopus film Paul Sorrentino has crafted that winds up our 2015 cinema experience!

Too intelligent to be populist, too beautiful to be ignored, so aware of the vagaries of the human condition, played by consummate professionals and ordinary folk displaying qualities that make their brief appearances on the screen memorable.

In a 10-star hotel in the Swiss Alps, providing the mega-rich with their every need, English composer and conductor Fred (Michael Caine) and American filmmaker Mick (Harvey Keitel), childhood friends, reminisce about their creative lives. 

Fred’s winsome daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz) shares his suite and monitors his needs. Her husband is about to destroy her self esteem by turning up with a bosomy pop singer in tow and the news that the marriage is over.

Her Maj in London has sent a flunky to invite Fred to conduct his magnum opus as a birthday gift to her husband. Nope, Fred won’t take the gig. In time we’ll learn why. Meanwhile, Mick and a team of writers and other forms of filmmaking acolyte are wrestling with the problems of creating a screenplay for Mick’s fifty-somethingth movie. 

Mick and Fred dispute which of them as a teenager didn’t screw Brenda (Jane Fonda) who arrives late in the film to belittle Fred’s talents and proclaim the death of cinema at the hands of TV. 

Lena soothes her anguish with the attentions of the hotel’s climbing instructor. Miss Universe arrives to escape the clamouring throng and skinny-dip in the hotel pool. An obese former footballer keeps a tennis ball in motion overhead without using his hands. In a moment of reminiscence, Fred gazes on a lush hillside where a vision of his films’ heroines, in costume, recalls what he has been. 

This is just a brief sampler from a film that sent this cynic out of the cinema convinced that Brenda was wrong (as I’m sure Sorrentino intended). Call yourself a cineaste?  Then don’t miss “Youth”, proclaiming, as if it were necessary, that cinema is alive and thriving.

At Palace Electric