Metacritic reviews

Anyone with a heart will be stirred by the generous, critical, humanist spirit shared by the kids in front of the camera and the grown-ups on the other side.

The inclusion of older footage from the Armando Diaz school, where Genoa police kettled protests during the 2001 G8 summit, reminds us that previous generations have equally hoped for change.

Some talk eloquently, some glare at the camera with cagey mistrust. But the point of this worthwhile and frequently fascinating project is that all have the opportunity to be heard.

Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher’s documentary rather faithfully captures the spirit of our times.

Too often here it’s the mouthy ones who get to hold court, which is to be expected, yet the Genoa sequence shows the dramatic dividends from a more focused approach.

Self-reflexiveness is no guarantee of value in a documentary, and Futura works perfectly well as cinematic reportage. Still, the film does at times feel slack and arbitrary—a bit like a census that no one could argue is unimportant but which nonetheless has the feel of a box-ticking exercise.

In the end, it’s a film with a melancholic feel, which probably has a lot to do with its timing.

Futura lives in the past and the present, not the future––attempting to say much more about what has made these people this way, not what they will do about it. For all of the talk about the future, this documentary has nothing insightful to say about it.