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90A masterful accomplishment...teems with its own sense of life, crackles with daring, walks the tightrope between satire and pathos with a rare assuredness.
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90Very much a fully realized cinematic experience. John Turturro, even if you have to act less, be sure to direct more, and often.
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80Everything falls into place and seems exactly right: the brisk tempo, the crisp, witty performances, the slightly sooty touch.
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75A gloriously giddy movie about theater, love and artifice, an unabashed art film.
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75Few movies are as eloquent in their performances and their art direction.
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75Self-satisfied -- an undisciplined brat of a film.
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75John Turturro's farce about life and theater that is by turns elegant and bawdy, but always transfixing.
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Summons the stock characters of behind-the-scenes theater stories and affectionately invests them with new life.
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70The true strength of the film lies in its vast ensemble of actors.
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67Often elegant, at times frustratingly uneven, comedy that is hopelessly in love with theatre, poetry, and -- for once -- marriage.
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63Beneath the noisy, farcical surface of John Turturro's Illuminata is a thoughtful and unusually mature meditation on love.
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63Like a thick slice of ham - tasty, elegantly prepared and served - that aspires to be gourmet fare but in the end turns out to be only half-baked.
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63Turturro tricks you into thinking there's magic realism streaming through this ode to art and commited love - despite there being little magic and not a trace of reality to speak of.
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63Susan Sarandon has never looked better in her 29-year screen career than she does here.
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For all its ambitions, Illuminata sheds only murky light on what separates theater from life.
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58The production feels self-congratulatory and illuminated only dimly.
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58It isn't, finally, satisfying: It's too uneven, indulgent, fey.
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50Overdone performances mar the fine ones -- (Turturro) has become, alas, a hambone.
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50Beverly D'Angelo, Rufus Sewell, Georgina Cates, Leo Bassi - tumble with zest through a daisy chain of sexual capers. But while warmly energized, their carryings-on also seem a little generic.
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50Unfocused. We feel cut adrift amid the various plot threads. This is exacerbated by some murky exposition. Characters, events, and the passage of time are not always clearly established.
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50Insights about romance are enhanced by the novel production design, which includes puppetry, but the story's reflexivity is smug and cloying.
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49Turturro's movie is all surface, all artifice, and little substance. Actors love artifice; the rest of us wait for it to clear so we can find something meatier.
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40A sloppy, self-indulgent valentine to the theater, delivered with all the grace of a letter-bomb.
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40Its pretensions eventually undo it.
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40I'll be damned if I can figure out how its various ingredients are supposed to blend together.
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25An incomprehensible mess -- so boring and numbingly unworkable that it's hard to imagine what he could have been thinking.
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