Testament of Youth

The gauzy and stale World War I memoir Testament of Youth currently holds an 82 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which only confirms my suspicion that 82 percent of film critics prefer to sleep through the movies that they review. Ex Machina robot Alicia Vikander plays real-life British writer Vera Brittain, a headstrong woman whose world is turned upside down when World War I starts calling away the men in her life, including an aspiring poet who becomes her fiancé (Kit Harington). BBC veteran James Kent makes his feature debut here, but the filmmaking is utterly embalmed, and Kent spends most of his time mooning over flower arrangements and curtain patterns, stranding his actors with the mustiest script in recent memory. Testament of Youth is an interior design spread masquerading as biography, nothing but a dainty and decorative pose of noble suffering, and it moves at roughly the pace of a waking death. D.B.