My Winnipeg Review

Guy Maddin is cinema’s master pasticheur, and he’s on wondrous form in this ‘docu-fantasia’ that blends fact and fiction with a glee that irradiates the brilliant recreations of filmmaking styles: from Soviet montage to Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette animations and film noir. Shifting between fury, regret and nostalgia, this reverie is as witty and moving as it is visually dazzling, with Ann Savage excelling as Maddin’s domineering mother. But his experiment to understand the past by restaging it is less compelling than rants about the foolish decisions that periodically betrayed the city’s working-class spirit, or mischievous set-pieces like a geriatric ice-hockey game and a fund-raising Nazi invasion stunt.