Critics reviews

There is swashbuckling, some of it rendered almost abstractly in a beautiful montage sequence tinted red with the heat of Tony and Bianca's passions and the fury of those whose clutches they're escaping, reinforced by almost pyroclastic billowings of red ink into the frame during an ensuing equestrian chase sequence.

These movies have a number of elements that keep them from caving in under their own sense of wonder: their manic bursts of bustling activity, their dense, sometimes jarring compositions, their reckless narrative speed. Still, it's striking that their artistic models are all either somehow naïve in their deceptions—the hand-tinted fixed-camera trick films of George Méliès and Segundo de Chomón—or so stiffly formalized as to be totally transparent about their own illusion-making...