Spoiler Warning: I can never help crying at this film

Rating: 8/10 (2 August 2001)

Yeah it's a long film, and yeah, some of the sequences are a little on the cringing side, but hey, it's a Terry Gilliam film and it is a great and magical journey despite all of its faults. Based on the photobook/stills film by Chris Marker "La Jetee" - a film Constance Penley once declared impossible to remake - any intelligent viewer will spot that this is a movie that is unlikely to end happily. Plotlines criss-cross all over the place in a time-twisting manner that makes the spiraling time-frame of "Terminator 2" seem positively easy to follow. The "Monkeys" virus subplot (or should that be McGuffin in the great Hitchcockian tradition?) is left throughly ambiguous at the end: but that isn't why I sob uncontrollably even though I've watched the movie about 20 times. SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER: Surely I cannot be the only sucker out there who just weeps when Kathryn Railly, realising the final truth of Cole's nightmarish dream / memory, searches the crowd for the sad-eyed boy who could not belong in the same time-space at two moments of his life. When their eyes lock - his in a pre-history of recognition/incomprehension, hers in weeping hope for a moment which cannot/could not/shall not be occur in the boy's later life - I defy anyone with heart and soul and a passion for magical movies to not shed a brief tear.