The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is one of those movies that, despite spectacular elements, doesn't add up to a spectacular film.

Terry Gilliam, the veteran film director who cut his teeth as the animation wizard of television's legendary Monty Python's Flying Circus, has flirted with genius throughout his career, and bedded her from time to time. In The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnas

If Ledger had completed the entire film or not, Doctor Parnassus doesn't seem well-focused enough to be a truly landmark Gilliam work but it's much closer than anything else he's done this millennium.

Parnassus is fun to watch a good deal of the time, and Gilliam is almost always visually surprising, but Ledger could have used a more momentous send-off.

It teases with magnificently tantalizing moments that don't quite add up to one grand insight. Which, come to think of it, is an epiphany of its own peculiar sort.

Has some inspired moments but does not exorcise the curse of forcefully finishing something that should have stayed invisible. [Full review in Spanish]

Made with autobiographical flourishes, the film acknowledges through wild visual and narrative symbolism the monumentality of Gilliam's filmmaking travails, how he has been all but crushed by those in power.

But it is difficult to be awed by Gilliam's imagination when it is so consistently unyoked to story and seems more about the director's own creative satisfaction than bequeathing his audience some reward for their time.

A cinematic stage that can only be described as a pantheon of visual delights, let your imagination run wild and enter The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.