Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus

Terry Gilliam is a disturbingly imaginative film director, a true auteur. Yet I often feel that his movies need a brusque old-style studio chief to holler "Cut", "Explain" and "Don't be too daft". After doing his very own cartoon thing on Monty Python's Flying Circus TV series in the UK, Gilliam became a British citizen and sometimes flew back to the States to try and make his mark and find movie production funds there.

It matters not a jot to its audience whether a movie has been funded in Dubai or Brussels, filmed on location in Canada or Morocco, sound-recorded in Hungary and had its sets built in East London or a CGI laboratory. With highly individual directors such as Gilliam, a few minutes into the film an audience knows exactly how and where it was made. Inside the writer-director's imagination.

It's therefore tempting to see The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus as partly autobiographical in its elaborate fantasy about an ageing showman's gamble with the unageing Devil (Tom Waits, who appeared in The Fisher King). Every Gilliam feature, from Brazil to The Fisher King, The Brothers Grimm to Time Bandits, Twelve Monkeys to Baron Munchausen, is a fantasy illustrated through hallucinatory scenes and cinematic magic. This time, the central character, played with serene melancholy by Christopher (12 Monkeys) Plummer, trundles around London with a ragtag troupe of young and weird assistants in a horse-drawn fairground wagon.

Good actors clearly love to work for and with Gilliam. Three of them stepped into the breach left by the death of the movie's top star, Heath (Brothers Grimm) Ledger. His character is a happy-go-lucky conman seeking answers behind the magician's secret mirror into other worlds. That device enables Johnny (Don Quixote) Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law to assume differing aspects of Ledger's character. Each of them performs well, fitting merrily into cameos set amid Gilliam's wildly technicolored animations of dreamlands.

Junior actors and extras also have good reasons to feel Gilliam is a special auteur. His movies provide memorable small, often comic, roles, this time including lustful shoppers, Russian mafiosi and other figments of blackly comic imagination.

The title of the movie is yet another marketing calamity, and I don't care if there really was a famous written tale that Gilliam transformed into his cinematic reality. The title should have changed, and that might have changed Gilliam's latest run of bad luck at the box office. Might have; there are too many moments, some very long, when cineplex audiences will scratch their collective head, fidget on their collective bum, and have no idea that movie audiences expected to be stoned back in Gilliam's youth.