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40The film never achieves any real depth in its unabashedly admiring portrait. What might have made a mildly interesting short feels vastly attenuated even with its brief 72-minute running time.
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50Colburn's focus is so single-mindedly laudatory that the whole collaborative process is reduced to people either helping or hindering the visiting genius.
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Nov 23, 201240The backstage commentary circles around the bailiwick of a production designer and frustrations over Mr. Helnwein's literal interpretations. But they are rarely juicy or pursued in depth, and platitudes abound (with the exception of a matter-of-fact lighting designer named Bambi).
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25This infomercial for Helnwein's work as designer for an Israeli opera called "The Child Dreams" doesn't tell us a lot about how opera comes together, but it is accidentally revealing about its subject.
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Nov 20, 201240While the opera nonetheless soars with its acrobatic choreography of refugee displacement, this documentary about it suffers some dramatic slackness from the inevitable drawing board tedium of performance preparation.
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Nov 20, 201240Helnwein's elaborate vision bumps up against practical concerns and meets with resistance - a conflict that this superficial portrait glosses over almost as much as it reduces Helnwein to simply being a determined, intransigent creative type.
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Nov 19, 201250Much of the documentary plays like a moderately well produced but tediously uncritical making-of feature that could easily have been included on the opera's DVD release.