The official English-language title is “The Best Years.” The opening movie in the Italian Film Festival, which begins this Thursday (Feb. 25), spans 40 years in the lives of four people. This is such a long time, and so much happens, that the movie could have been a miniseries, an Italian “Dance to the Music of Time.” But it runs just over two hours. Don’t blink or you’ll miss something.

Written and directed by Gabriele Muccino, “The Best Years” follows four friends in Rome through four decades of their lives, loves, marriages, careers, hopes and disappointments, successes and failures. It begins in 1980, when they are all in the bloom and eagerness of adolescence, and ends in the present day, when they’re older and wiser, with teenagers of their own.