60
Inventive and anarchic, but by no means Gilliam’s masterpiece, Quixote reminds us of the romantic ideal that the world needs dreamers who dare to defy convention.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
90
It is an uncompromising work that will make many viewers frustrated and even furious. I adored pretty much every single glorious, gorgeous goddamn minute of it.
40
The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney
Large-scale filmmaking of this kind to some degree is probably always an adventurer's folly, with an unhinged visionary tilting at windmills in a valiant quest to tame fantasy and reality into companionable travelers that will live forever. But rarely have such brave deeds yielded so meager a reward.
40
New York Magazine (Vulture) by Emily Yoshida
The experience of watching it, especially given its dreamlike unreality and head-scratching punnery (this is a deeply unfunny movie) is like listening to a doddering old man for whom every story — about art, politics, local goings on — ends up being about how every woman is an evil witch that can’t be trusted.
67
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote sits alongside much of Gilliam’s late period work as a messy but singular achievement that strains to make its disparate parts fit together, but there’s a noble spirit of invention to its wackiness anyway.
67
It is certainly too long and too messy, too indulgent in some parts and too starved in others to be an unqualified success. But the surprise of it is that there are times, like the inspired first act, when it really does work, when it seems to have a kind of manic energy, a sheer joy at existing, which certainly makes it a far more engaging picture than Gilliam’s last.
60
Los Angeles Times by Justin Chang
To call the movie a mess would be to state the obvious and perhaps miss the point. The movie’s sense of moment-to-moment chaos — madcap scenes of bellowing, falling, tumbling and general agitating — is scarcely accidental. It is, on the contrary, very deliberately achieved.
40
If anything, it’s what the director’s fans most feared: a lumbering, confused, and cacophonous mess
60
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
Even when the film feels like a circuitous, effortful mess, it’s often an intentional one – and for everything in the film that doesn’t quite connect, that element of self-portraiture, with the artist as sap, strikes a wistful chord.
50
Screen International by Tim Grierson
Despite how personally the filmmaker connects with this ambitious riff on the Cervantes novel, the long-time passion project succumbs to the same indulgences and weaknesses that have plagued his recent movies.