Recencies van critici

It's a performance that ranks with some of Cage's best, a mix of Pig's earnestness and Adaptation's idiosyncrasies. But it's also a fitting counterpart to last year's broader, more meta The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent... In Unbearable Weight, that was the joke. Here, it's the tragedy.

Dream Scenario further mines the director’s fascination with fame – the cost of it, the fickle nature of it, the indignities of it. It’s a savagely funny showcase for Cage at his very best. But the picture sours somewhat in a third act that departs from crisp character study to target cancel culture, losing some of its biting humour in the process.

Dream Scenario is however a smart film about the uncanny experience of fame, its self-consciousness and self-alienation... a cousin to Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich and Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, and very enjoyable; it is at once strangely light-hearted and heavy with menace.

It’s not unfunny, to be sure, and Cage continues to be ruthlessly entertaining. But it’s hard not to feel like a beautiful, provocative premise is being sacrificed on the altar of a few topical yuks.

Less singular in its vision than Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario may be a hilariously scary ride, but by the final 30 minutes, Borgli has lost sight of his original aims.

Pondering the downside of notoriety and our willingness to exchange safety for fame, “Dream Scenario” is often funny and frequently surreal... Here, though, he has more ideas than space to execute them, and the movie’s third act can feel overloaded and indecisive of where it wants to land.

Nicolas Cage is everywhere all at once in this dark and brilliantly doolally satire... It all loses a bit of its circadian rhythm with a tacked-on sci-fi storyline involving social media ‘dreamfluencers’. But as a giddy showcase for a bang-on-form Cage, with some needle-sharp observations about fame in the 21st century, this Ari Aster-produced dark comedy is the best kind of cheese dream.

It’s amusing, up to a point... in turning Paul into a poster child for the socially ostracized — an unfortunate victim of the crowd mentalities he’s spent his career studying — the movie itself seems to shrink just at the point when it should be expanding. It feels conceptually and imaginatively reduced.

If this cynical and funny consideration of the distance between a person and their curated image in the collective (un)consciousness comes with any caveat, it’s that it, itself, feels ever so slightly synergistic.

Dream Scenario morphs from a Charlie Kaufman–esque cringe comedy into a simmering nightmare thriller, staging some genuinely unsettling hallucinations but failing to knit them into any larger narrative.

Nicolas Cage plays a mediocre stand-in for all 'canceled' men in this provocative cringe comedy, driven by a sharp screenplay and subtly surreal filmmaking. The movie loses focus towards the end, but has a lot to say about fame and its consequences in the social-media era.

Throughout Dream Scenario, Borgli clearly has numerous targets in his satirical sights, from cancel culture to corporate influencer lifestyle (a late-film gag about “dreamfluencers” is spot on). Yet while consistently amusing, it doesn’t seem like Borgli ultimately has much to say about any of this, making the film’s critiques seem rather unfocused and slight.