Article: TERRY GILLIAM'S FLYING CIRCUS ; There are plenty of wild ideas and fine performances in the former Python's latest epic - but his flights of fancy don't really lead anywhere FILM OF THE WEEK

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS Cert 12A, 123 mins ***

I WONDER if I am alone in thinking Terry Gilliam has a dickensian mind. It will seem unlikely if you think of dickens as the arch realist. If you think of him as the great imagineer, a Victorian fantasist, a master of comic extravagance, then he and Gilliam might well be neighbours. Gilliam is an end-of-the-pier conjuror, a very english sort of magician, whose films show pluck, jollity, darkness and a great fertility of invention. But are they ever coherent?

After Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, this is Gilliam's third collaboration with the writer Charles McKeown. Set in the present day, it seeks to tell the story of ...

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