Director Paolo Sorrentino’s best films are artful explorations of inward [...]

Will Smith, Jessica Chastain, Maren Ade, Fan Binbing, Park Chan-Wook, Paolo Sorrentino and Gabriel Yared (a French-Lebanese composer known for writing the score for "The English Patient") have just been announced as this year’s jurors at the 2017 Cannes Festival, celebrating seventy years this year. These brave men and women will help jury president Pedro Almodóvar in choosing a winner among this year's

There is a moment in Paolo Sorrentino’s YOUTH when the aging conductor and composer, played by Michael Caine, stops in a beautiful European meadow to watch the cows. At first we are listening to each dong of a cowbell as a separate sound. Slowly he begins to hear the music hidden inside them. With a bit of imagination, the conductor soon raises a hand to conduct. If the film has a metaphor, this is it. It takes every random "dong" and connects them into a symphony. When not conducting cows, the conductor has retreated to a luxury spa-hotel that might be Purgatory.

Forty years ago, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo ) wrote a book that became an instant best-seller and is still read and more or less remembered—by some as a frothy and irrelevant intellectual joke, by others as a life-changing and profound work of literature. What Gambardella himself is reminded of when people mention the book is that he hasn’t written another one since, not for lack of wanting to but more for lack of time