The Illusionist

Directed by Sylvain Chomet

(PG)

***

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

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.

Sign up

The animator Sylvain Chomet is a filmmaker who “doesn’t need dialogue” to tell an emotionally complex story, said Peter Rainer in The Christian Science Monitor. This touching work, his first movie since 2003’s delightfully droll The Triplets of Belleville, follows an aging traveling magician as he develops a paternal bond with a teenage chambermaid who’s dazzled by his illusions. The characters barely speak, but they don’t need to: Their semicomic tale finds moments that “match the piercing melancholy” of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. Mid-20th-century Edinburgh “never looked more fairy-tale gorgeous” than it does when the pair settles into shabby lodgings alongside some acrobats, a ventriloquist, and “the inevitable sad clown,” said Amy Biancolli in the Houston Chronicle. The movie, drawn from a script by the late French screen star Jacques Tati, is also often funny, said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. Mostly, though, it’s a quiet tragedy about “the gulf that can grow between a father and daughter as the latter moves forward and the former stays put.” It helps us believe in magic only to the point that we should.