Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Toby, a cynical film director finds himself trapped in the outrageous delusions of an old Spanish shoe-maker who believes himself to be Don Quixote. In the course of their comic and increasingly surreal adventures, Toby is forced to confront the tragic repercussions of a film he made in his idealistic youth.
Terry Gilliam's decades-in-the-making passion project is visually ravishing and conceptually audacious — a meta-cinematic hall of mirrors blending Cervantes with modern filmmaking anxieties in a way only Gilliam could conceive. The cinematography is lush and inventive, capturing the sun-baked Spanish landscapes with painterly grandeur. Novelty is unquestionable: the film's tortured 30-year production history and its self-referential layers about obsession, idealism, and the corrupting power of art make it genuinely singular. However, the plot meanders significantly, struggling to balance its multiple tonal registers and losing coherence in the third act. The acting is serviceable — Jonathan Pryce brings genuine pathos to Quixote and Adam Driver is committed — but neither performance fully transcends the script's weaknesses. The ending is the film's most significant flaw: after such a wild, surreal journey, the resolution feels rushed, narratively muddled, and emotionally unearned, a disappointment given the weight of expectation the premise builds.