Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty) has made something of a crowd pleaser, a gorgeous consideration of the artistic impulse that yields up its fruits without too much of a struggle. (A little patience may be required while the weaver spins out his threads, but they all wind up woven, and it’s fun to watch in the meantime.) Michael Caine is Fred Ballinger, a retired composer dead set against revisiting the Simple Songs he wrote at the start of his career, even if the Queen of England asks him to conduct them. Harvey Keitel is his friend Mick Boyle, a working director trying to find a satisfying ending to a late-period project starring the woman he made famous decades ago. (At one point, both men contemplate a beauty bearing the title of, yes, Miss Universe.) The treatment of their criss-crossing trajectories (in both art and life) might tempt a certain sort of critic toward a line like, “We make music because we’re alive. We tell stories because we are going to die.” But really, there’s no need for such hifalutin comment, not when an actor in the film says simply, “I have to choose what is really worth telling: horror or desire? And I choose desire.” (See also: the film’s title.) (2015) — Matthew Lickona