The Illusionist.

"At first glance, Neil Burger's first two features [Interview With the Assassin and The Illusionist] couldn't be further apart," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in a 4-out-of-4-star review for the Chicago Reader. "But Burger's exceptional gifts as a storyteller and as a director of actors are fully apparent in both, and he's up to something similar in both, playing with the imagination and credulity of the viewer."

Updated through 8/20.

Rosenbaum recalls a lesson from Orson Welles to illustrate a point, and lo, Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com: "Like F for Fake, the delightful meditation on art and deception by Orson Welles, The Illusionist places the very film you're watching at the center of the illusion.... The movie sets up a fascinating parable about art, religion and politics, and the misty boundaries between them."

Stephen Holden in the New York Times: "Storytelling is also a kind of conjuring, and The Illusionist, at least until its frantic final moments, is smart enough not to lose its cool and to stay out of the way of the entrancing yarn it spins."

Slate's Dana Stevens: "It's an exquisitely crafted period picture that keeps promising more and more as it goes along - smarter ideas, richer themes, spookier plot twists - and keeps delivering on every promise, right up until the rug-pulling and overly hasty final sequence."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek: "It moves along with the utmost certainty that we'll be dazzled by it, as if enchantment were a thing that could be enforced. But in the end, The Illusionist got me."

"[F]or all the handsome upgrades in style, story and production values," writes Josef Braun for Vue Weekly, "The Illusionist still benefits most from precisely the same thing that made its predecessor so memorable: the movie dazzles with possibilities yet never quite gives up its tricks."

Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle: "The Illusionist is very much reminiscent of a forgotten 1932 picture called Arsene Lupin, starring John Barrymore as a master art thief and his brother Lionel Barrymore as the detective determined to put him behind bars. The challenge there was the same as here - to craft an elaborate story that ultimately satisfies the audience's affection for both conflicting characters. In both films, the success is complete."

Carina Chocano, writing in the Los Angeles Times, is less enthusiastic but finds Paul Giamatti and Rufus Sewell "fun to watch."

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Christopher Kelly is more in line with Thursday's crowd: "Burger has approached this soapy-sudsy, rabbit-out-of-a-hat material with a joylessness and propriety normally reserved for Holocaust dramas; this is likely the least magical movie ever made about magic."

Update, 8/20: Richard Corliss for Time: "Burger has tricks up his sleeve, but he's not a cheat.... By the end, the canniest viewers may not be fooled, but - and you can believe this - they may be mesmerized."

Posted by dwhudson at August 19, 2006 8:16 AM