Beautiful, interesting, incredible cinema.

See what’s playing

Critics reviews

THE ILLUSIONIST

Sylvain Chomet France, 2010
The melancholy tenor is aided enormously by the hand-painted animation, which nowadays comes imbued with its own poignancy. But is retrograde whimsy all Chomet sees in Tati, who at his Playtime peak could have modernists like Kubrick and Kienholz furiously taking notes? On its own, the film has gauzy charm; as an evocation of another artist, it’s reductively forlorn.
March 1, 2011
The Illusionist is absolutely mandatory viewing for aspiring animators and filmmakers. (In terms of pacing, scoring, editing, and narrative, it's a film school unto itself.) For the rest of us, however, it's simply magic.
February 11, 2011
Read full article
This is a remarkable movie: lovely, slow-paced and almost silent, rich with pathos and deft comic gestures... What Tati might have done with such a wee plot is open to speculation, but Chomet fills it with the hope of youth and the dark romance of a man coming to terms with his own disappearance.
January 14, 2011
The movie is rife with Tati’s brand of drolly inventive slapstick... The dialogue is multilingual but largely incidental to the action; the physical comedy is gracefully rendered and often magical.
January 13, 2011
Chomet has drawn [The Illusionist] with a lightness and beauty worthy of an older, sadder Miyazaki story. Animation suits it. Live action would overwhelm its delicate fancy with realism... However much [the film] conceals the real-life events that inspired it, it lives and breathes on its own, and as an extension of the mysterious whimsy of Tati.
January 12, 2011
much of the pleasure in “The Illusionist” lies with the story’s random incidents and detours... Best of all is [the film's] gorgeous, delicately colored visual palette. Views of London’s Big Ben in the rain, the Scottish countryside and especially Edinburgh as it was half a century ago... delight us and remind us how many different ways animation can charm and captivate. There is something magical about “The Illusionist’s” world, and that’s as it should be.
December 25, 2010
Savoring [The Illusionist's] singular bittersweetness—and accepting its imperfections—requires suspending customary expectations of story and narrative pace. And of dialogue, since many scenes suggest a silent film. What's left to savor, then? Exquisite images, poignant humor, echoes of cinema history and a sense of having watched genuine magic.
December 24, 2010
In the end, Tati and Chomet are saying something complex but true here, testifying to the necessity of fakery while acknowledging that illusions can be cruel. The result is one beautiful movie—and no less so for making a strong case that beauty is a lie.
December 24, 2010
The New York Times
To see “The Illusionist” exclusively as a Jacques Tati film — to read it only through his biography or, as regrettably, to see it, hoping for a new Tati — is to disregard the actual extant film. Mr. Chomet, as evident from “The Triplets of Belleville,” is not Tati (no one else is), but rather his own artist.
December 23, 2010
No less impressive than Chomet’s character animation is his sense of timing. For its 80 minutes, the movie creates the illusion that not just Tati but his form of cerebral slapstick lives. Late in the movie, M. Tatischeff leaves Alice a note, explaining, “Magicians do not exist.” The Illusionist means to demonstrate that they do.
December 22, 2010
A simple, emotionally potent story... The steady cascade of tiny, finely observed, slyly witty visual details conveying character, setting, and the 1950s verge-of-the-modern era is Chomet’s own distinctive poetic contribution to Tati’s story. So is his thoughtful insistence on hand-drawn 2-D graphics. ”The strength of 2-D…is it vibrates and it’s not perfect, just like reality in fact,” the director has said. Here’s a perfect demonstration of that aesthetic truth.
December 7, 2010
Chomet’s animated Tati makes one long for the flesh-and-blood physical comedy of the original; this sort of tribute is more tolerable in small doses, such as the one-off caricatures in Triplets. But a story of wistful drift between an elderly man and his young charge is an impressive move for the acclaimed animator, who returns to the key of nostalgia yet embraces its lows as well as its highs.
December 1, 2010
Follow us on
  • About
  • Ways to Watch
QR code

Scan to get the app