Trance
A hypnotist helps pull off an art heist.
Directed by Danny Boyle
(R)
***
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Danny Boyle’s latest exercise in “candy-colored escapism” is “one of the most purely entertaining” movies the Slumdog Millionaire director has made in a long time, said Ignatiy Vishnevetsky in the Chicago Sun-Times. After an auction-house employee (James McAvoy) is knocked on the head during the apparent heist of a Goya painting, the film “plays fast and loose” with viewers’ expectations about the characters while bombarding the eyes with inventive visuals. Just don’t expect Boyle to deliver logical plotting—or any emotional rewards. Often, ��it feels as if he’s throwing everything at the screen” simply “to obscure the material’s thinness,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. But look past the film’s “rampant trippiness” and you might notice a few wonderful performances, said Stephanie Zacharek in NPR.org. Vincent Cassel makes a “supremely” charming heist leader, and Rosario Dawson is more than persuasive as a hypnotherapist charged with helping an injured co-conspirator recover his memory of where the Goya’s been stashed. “If she blew in your ear, you’d follow her anywhere.”
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Is this the end of the late-night chat show?
Talking Point Totems of US media landscape 'seem like relics of a bygone era' as ad revenues plummet and viewers switch to YouTube, TikTok and podcasts
-
Keep the fun going with these 7 subscription gift boxes
The Week Recommends Bring the party to their mailbox
-
Babies born using 3 people's DNA are without hereditary disease
Under the radar The method could eliminate mutations for future generations