40 Years, 6 Hours, 2 DVDs...

The Best of Youth (5/5 stars)

The Best of Youth is a 6 hour long mini-series that originally appeared on Italian television but was also played on a very limited basis in American theaters in 2005. Essentially, it follows the key events that happen to an Italian family for 40 years from the early 1960s to the present.

There is no central theme to explain here, and there are way too many individual events to express, as you might expect of a story about about a family over this amount of time there are many important things going on: people enter and leave the story, different people and plots intersect each other years apart, events of great happiness and great sadness occur, and we see how the characters change as they age and how they are affected by the real-life climate of Italy during the time period.

If I could figure out a way to classify this into a year, it would be one of the best. It doesn't seem like it was made for television, as such it easily blows any mini-series HBO has ever done out of the water (which coming from me, is actually saying quite a bit). The length should not be an issue for anyone who appreciates quality, and if necessary, could be watched in the two 3 hour installments it comes it comes in separately.