Synopsis
Toby, a cynical film director finds himself trapped in the outrageous delusions of an old Spanish shoe-maker who believes himself to be Don Quixote. In the course of their comic and increasingly surreal adventures, Toby is forced to confront the tragic repercussions of a film he made in his idealistic youth.
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Cast
- Adam DriverToby
- Jonathan PryceDon Quixote
- Stellan SkarsgårdThe Boss
- Jordi MollàAlexei Miiskin
- Joana RibeiroAngelica
- Óscar JaenadaGitano
- Olga KurylenkoJacqui
- Rossy de Palma
- Sergi López
- Paloma BloydMelissa
Recommendations
- 90
Village Voice
It is an uncompromising work that will make many viewers frustrated and even furious. I adored pretty much every single glorious, gorgeous goddamn minute of it. - 67
IndieWire
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote sits alongside much of Gilliam’s late period work as a messy but singular achievement that strains to make its disparate parts fit together, but there’s a noble spirit of invention to its wackiness anyway. - 67
The Playlist
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, a sheer joy at existing, which certainly makes it a far more engaging picture than Gilliam’s last. - 60
The Telegraph
Even when the film feels like a circuitous, effortful mess, it’s often an intentional one – and for everything in the film that doesn’t quite connect, that element of self-portraiture, with the artist as sap, strikes a wistful chord. - 60
Los Angeles Times
To call the movie a mess would be to state the obvious and perhaps miss the point. The movie’s sense of moment-to-moment chaos — madcap scenes of bellowing, falling, tumbling and general agitating — is scarcely accidental. It is, on the contrary, very deliberately achieved. - 60
Time Out
Inventive and anarchic, but by no means Gilliam’s masterpiece, Quixote reminds us of the romantic ideal that the world needs dreamers who dare to defy convention. - 50
Screen Daily
Despite how personally the filmmaker connects with this ambitious riff on the Cervantes novel, the long-time passion project succumbs to the same indulgences and weaknesses that have plagued his recent movies. - 40
The Hollywood Reporter
Large-scale filmmaking of this kind to some degree is probably always an adventurer's folly, with an unhinged visionary tilting at windmills in a valiant quest to tame fantasy and reality into companionable travelers that will live forever. But rarely have such brave deeds yielded so meager a reward.
