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Ten years since his last directorial outing, Francis Ford Coppola feels the pangs of lost time. Youth Without Youth is the eccentric tale of an aging academic (Tim Roth) who fears death will find him before he's able to complete his greatest work. With velvet shadows encroaching and soft snow falling, Ford captures all the wistful melancholy of a man faced with a profound existential dilemma. Then...ZAP! A thunderbolt lights him up like an energy-saving bulb.

When the bandages come off, Dominic is restored to a sprightly 30-something. He doesn't do much about it except lie still to be poked and prodded by baffled doctors and seduced by The Woman In Room 6 who could just be a manifestation of the bizarre dreams which start to bleed into reality. Then another sharp left turn: Dominic falls for Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara), a dead ringer for his childhood sweetheart Laura but who is apparently possessed by the 7th Century disciple of Indian scholar Chandrakirti.

"TOTAL LACK OF FOCUS"

At this point, if Bobby Ewing stepped out of the shower you wouldn't bat an eyelid. In fleshing out the novella by philosopher and professor of religion Mircea Eliade, it appears Coppola has taken the seed of an idea, messed with its DNA and sprouted a mutant Tree of Knowledge with tendrils going off in all directions. It looks beautiful, but there's a total lack of focus. Initially he's concerned with Dominic's predicament, but when Veronica enters the picture, her story takes over as he struggles to decipher the message contained in her fits of Sanskrit babble. You'll certainly feel his pain because all these threads fail to come together in any coherent way. It's impossible to say for sure, but the moral of the story could be: don't waste your time.

Youth Without Youth is out in the UK on 14th December 2007.