Terry Gilliam's troubled, over-budget portrayal of a Quixotic nobleman and his fantastical adventures. The notorious Baron appears in the audience during a stage production dedicated to his life, scolds the company for missing important details and sets the record straight in a series of farfetched recollections.

Served with Gilliam's characteristically twisted sense of surreality and lavish visual know-how, _Munchausen_ is a creative playground with no limitations. This lack of oversight frees the former _Monty Python_ animator to get as conceptually crazy as he likes - Robin Williams drops by to play the disembodied, floating head of the ten-story-tall king of the moon, for example - but also cuts its tethers, allowing the plot to sail away like a lost balloon. The result is a sort of fairy tale theater; dreamlike and contradictory, it changes shape and meaning on the fly. The idea is to frame the whole saga as a staggering, meandering fiction, improvised in a pinch by a confused old man. Which works in theory, but also leads to a foggy finished product that doesn't connect many dots and long overstays its welcome.

It all plays like a project that leapt into production without a finished screenplay, built a number of imaginative sets and costumes, recruited many of the director's famous friends and then tried to wing it under the bright lights. Exciting ideas don't always remain that way if they aren't developed into something coherent.