The latest in a long line of confounding Terry Gilliam movies that I can't decide whether to love or hate. Parnassus comes fully equipped with the director's requisites: damningly eccentric characters, gorgeous cinematography, far-left-field humor, delicate plot and utterly befuddling dialog.

The scenes set inside the imaginarium are fantastic, dream logic-dominated landscapes on par with Michel Gondry's best work, where we're encouraged to celebrate the fact that absolutely nothing is static and chaos rules. Unfortunately, the real world scenes do nothing to lasso the film to the ground in any way, a function which was desperately needed. When the dust settled, I... think... I understood what this was all about? That's more than I could've said for some of the Python alum's earlier work, at least after one viewing.

Either way, it's basically a moving painting. You take away what you can and just accept that some parts of it aren't meant to be comprehended by anyone but the artist.