The thing I really love about Terry Gilliam is how fearless he is. His movies are glorious hodgepodges of everything that fascinates and scares him, and he just keeps cramming anxieties and audacities and myths and symbols and jokes and tassels and cherries on top until you just about can’t breathe anymore and you hardly know where to look onscreen and you have to get let it wash over you, this cinematic *experience.* Or not. Gilliam doesn’t seem to care about box office, which is good, because the box office doesn’t seen to care for him, too often (*The Brothers Grimm* hasn’t even yet earned back half its budget).

Actor Liev Schreiber (The Manchurian Candidate) aims high for his directorial debut with an ambitious, potentially precarious story about the indelible pull of the past and the enveloping warmth of family… and he succeeds fantastically, gifting us with a visually witty, beautifully painterly film that is extraordinarily wise when it isn’t quirky-funny. A sensitive, oddball … more…

Remember when roller skates had eight wheels instead of a “blade” and Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” was always the final song of the rink session? Then you’re gonna love this exuberant homage to the brief, glorious time in American pop culture when disco reigned supreme and the skating rink was the teenage hangout on Saturday … more…

To be sure, this is a handsome adaptation of Charles Dickens’s classic tale of blah blah blah. All the bits are in place: the “Please, sir, I want some more,” the kindly coffin maker and his mean ol’ wife, the Artful Dodger and Fagin and Sykes, the saintly Mr. Brownlow, and through it all, one … more…