Illuminata

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

A masterful accomplishment...teems with its own sense of life, crackles with daring, walks the tightrope between satire and pathos with a rare assuredness.

LA Weekly John Patterson

Very much a fully realized cinematic experience. John Turturro, even if you have to act less, be sure to direct more, and often.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

Everything falls into place and seems exactly right: the brisk tempo, the crisp, witty performances, the slightly sooty touch.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Few movies are as eloquent in their performances and their art direction.

Baltimore Sun Ann Hornaday

John Turturro's farce about life and theater that is by turns elegant and bawdy, but always transfixing.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Self-satisfied -- an undisciplined brat of a film.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

A gloriously giddy movie about theater, love and artifice, an unabashed art film.

Newsweek Andrea C. Basora

The true strength of the film lies in its vast ensemble of actors.

The New York Times Janet Maslin

Summons the stock characters of behind-the-scenes theater stories and affectionately invests them with new life.

Austin Chronicle Sarah Hepola

Often elegant, at times frustratingly uneven, comedy that is hopelessly in love with theatre, poetry, and -- for once -- marriage.

New York Post Hannah Brown

Like 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.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

Turturro 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.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Beneath the noisy, farcical surface of John Turturro's Illuminata is a thoughtful and unusually mature meditation on love.

USA Today Mike Clark

Susan Sarandon has never looked better in her 29-year screen career than she does here.

Village Voice Ethan Alter

For all its ambitions, Illuminata sheds only murky light on what separates theater from life.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It isn't, finally, satisfying: It's too uneven, indulgent, fey.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

The production feels self-congratulatory and illuminated only dimly.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

Beverly 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.

Dallas Observer Andy Klein

Unfocused. 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.

Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector

Insights about romance are enhanced by the novel production design, which includes puppetry, but the story's reflexivity is smug and cloying.

Miami Herald Curtis Morgan

Overdone performances mar the fine ones -- (Turturro) has become, alas, a hambone.

Mr. Showbiz Michael Atkinson

Turturro'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.

Film.com John Hartl

Its pretensions eventually undo it.

TV Guide Ken Fox

A sloppy, self-indulgent valentine to the theater, delivered with all the grace of a letter-bomb.

Film.com Robert Horton

I'll be damned if I can figure out how its various ingredients are supposed to blend together.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

An incomprehensible mess -- so boring and numbingly unworkable that it's hard to imagine what he could have been thinking.