Critics reviews

The filmmaker’s devotion to the novelist adds luster and vigor to the images, but this is more than just an act of literary-minded reverence. It’s a meeting of minds — a celebration of artistic kinship across the gulfs of history, culture and technology.

Gilliam’s film engages with Don Quixote in an attempt to resurrect and revivify its significance.

At its best, the film’s ode to analog film-fantasy (through Toby’s misadventures with a man who thinks he’s Don Quixote) draws a meaningful parallel with Cervantes’s romantic-ironic celebration of chivalry.

While the movie was not a disaster and Adam Driver powers through as a jerk director rediscovering the magic of life and cinema and love and stuff, the best thing about this glorified knight’s tale is that it’s done and we don’t have to hear about it again.

Most of "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote" is not so much irritating as it is inert. The budget to make this film on its intended scale doesn't look like it ever materialized, and for long stretches, Pryce, the ostensible source of fun here, vanishes entirely. Though Driver has been given more to work with, eventually more starts to seem like less.

Few directors can pull that off. Gilliam can, because the energy of his scenes, once you get on their wavelength, is infectious. The plot isn’t so much episodic or circular as it is spiraling, with everything — story, symbols, characters — accelerating toward a climax set in a castle where the present and the past, royalty and oligarchy, art and commerce, religion and parody, all collide.

Gilliam’s bete noir and Gilliam’s white whale was almost sure to turn out to be Gilliam’s white elephant, right? And it is certainly too long and too messy, too indulgent in some parts and too starved in others to be an unqualified success. But the surprise of it is that there are times, like the inspired first act, when it really does work, when it seems to have a kind of manic energy.