Recensioni de* critic*

This emotional detachment is often treated as an existential position, so the story occasionally suggests a beat version of Camus' The Stranger, with the images' sensual and erotic power often superseding any literal meaning. Despite the flashback structure, this is a film in which mood matters more than plot, while the hero's heroic stature steadily shrinks. All in all, a very impressive second feature.

It's a dark, brooding film... Now and then the dialogue grows a little too florid, but Giles Nuttgens' noir camerawork and the excellent performances of all four principals carry the day.

Perfectly cast and superbly acted all round, with a vibrant pivotal performance from Emily Mortimer, Young Adam is a fine piece of art, but it struggles to be an equally fine piece of entertainment. At times director David Mackenzie seems to mistake pauses for tension and landscape for mood, like Harold Pinter on a bad day, though elsewhere the dialogue is beautifully judged.

[A] finely observed moral drama... From the sooty riverbanks of industrial Scotland [Mackenzie] fashions a landscape that is gravely beautiful, but never falsely romantic... He’s a filmmaker to watch.

[Young Adam] is an almost Dostoyevskian study of a man brooding upon evil until it paralyzes him.

Joe's sexuality, while exhibited with quite a bit more explicitness than the old movies would permit, is also what makes ''Young Adam'' feel most dated. Its view of male narcissism, as expressed through erotic need, is not only uncritical but also pretentious.

Sharp, cold, and thoroughly riveting... Young Adam completely shatters the sanitised image of 50s Britain as, inch by inch, Mackenzie pulls you nose-deep into Joe's crushing existential anxiety.

Young Adam is no more than a series of naughty sexual encounters with a specious moral quandary tacked on at the end. It lacks both the dangerous allure of Tropic of Cancer and the walking-on-eggshells existentialism of Crime and Punishment.

Everything about this adaptation shows it to be a labour of love... [Young Adam] is a dreamy, disquieting study of sexual tension and guilty secrets. The movie drifts downriver, like the tatty barge on which it's set, towards its finale at a sensational murder trial, resembling something out of Witness for the Prosecution.

Mackenzie handles the pace of this beautifully, steering the narrative along with the confidence of an old bargehand. One gets the very rare sense of a director who knows exactly what effects he wants to create.

Mackenzie resists jazzing up his story with any spurious sense of urgency or passion... Young Adam moves with the torpid, inexorable pace of the coal barge itself, abetted by David Byrne's moody score. Such assured film-making augurs well for Mackenzie's next projects.

Young Adam demonstrates a thematic aspiration and sureness of tone that remains rare in British film-making. Director David Mackenzie has managed to rescue a neglected literary classic, identify himself with a modish cultural outlaw and find a way to challenge an increasingly conservative British film-making establishment.