Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira's film career has spanned 70 years, beginning at the cusp of the sound era, but he still remains mostly unknown outside his home country. The pastoral splendor of Voyage To The Beginning Of The World, de Oliveira's semi-autobiographical reverie on aging and identity, will undoubtedly resonate with those familiar with his work. For others, this talky road movie is like a travelogue with excruciatingly dull guides, by turns too cryptic or too obvious to carry much significance. In his final role, the great Marcello Mastroianni (8 1/2, La Dolce Vita) stars as a director driving around the countryside with three of his colleagues, including Jean-Yves Gautier, a French actor of Portuguese descent who's searching for an aunt he's never met. Their journey is marked by frequent stops, where Mastroianni ruminates on his childhood and comes to terms with his past. With its simple premise, languorous pacing, and attention to natural (and national) beauty, Voyage has drawn comparisons to the work of other regional-landscape directors like Theo Angelopoulos (Ulysses' Gaze) and Aleksandr Sokurov (Mother And Son). Since there's very little dramatic tension in these films, their effectiveness is staked almost entirely on the power of the imagery, and what might strike one person as lyrical and profound could seem ponderous and empty to another. The fact that Voyage is such a personal meditation, like de Oliveira's version of Wild Strawberries, tends to work against it, because its meanings are too insular to have universal appeal. Fittingly, his pilgrimage comes to an end in the most obscure corner of the world.