There's no denying Terry Gilliam's place among the great auteurs of modern cinema, but even his usual visual flair can't paper over the cracks in this landscape. There are moments here of bewildering imagination, but also lengthy sequences where the narrative slows to a crawl and the dialogue appears to have been made up on the spot.
The late Heath Ledger makes a decent stab at capturing his character's splintered personality (a trait underlined by the trio of actors drafted in to play the same role in Parnassus' dreamverse) and Lily Cole is surprisingly effective in her first major screentime, but the overall impression is of a disjointed jigsaw which simply doesn't fit together coherently.
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