The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

2019 long-awaited movie

Rating: 10/20

Plot: A director returns to the area where he filmed a version of Don Quixote during grad school and loses track of what's real and what's fantasy when he meets up with some familiar faces.

Credit the location scout for most of what's good about this long-awaited Gilliam supposed-to-be masterpiece although Adam Driver doing a Nicolas Cage thing almost works and Jonathan Pryce is really good in the titular role--the Cervantes character, not the man who killed him. This is Gilliam at his sloppiest, and while a Gilliam treatise on creativity and muses that bounces between reality and fantasy without warning looks great on paper, this was confusing and didn't honestly a little boring. It felt patched together, the product of thirty years of frustrating stops and starts. The latter, of course, makes sense.

I really really wanted to like this movie, especially while watching a "making-of" deal following the film, interview and behind-the-scenes snippets that made everybody involved just seem so enthusiastic about what they were doing.

A climactic party scene has a kind of chaotic energy that shows Gilliam might still have something in the tank. I also enjoyed shots from the film-within-the-film representing the earlier work of Adam Driver's character.