"Meet you in Malkovich in one hour"

Rating: 7/10 (7 May 2014)

What an endlessly inventive movie this is! It supplies the audience a stream of dazzling inventions, twists and wicked paradoxes. Rare is the movie where the last half hour surprises you just as much as the first, and in ways you're not expecting. The movie has ideas enough for half a dozen films, but Jonze and his cast handle them so surely that we never feel hard- pressed; we're enchanted by one development after the next.
Behind a filing cabinet on the 7 1/2th floor, Craig finds a small doorway. He crawls through it, and is whisked through some kind of temporal-spatial portal, ending up inside the brain of the actor John Malkovich. Here he stays for exactly 15 minutes, before falling from the sky next to the New Jersey Turnpike.
Malkovich himself is part of the magic. He is not playing himself here, but a version of his public image—distant, quiet, droll, as if musing about things that happened long ago and were only mildly interesting at the time. It took some courage for him to take this role, but it would have taken more courage to turn it down.
The movie just keeps getting better. I don't want to steal the surprises and punch lines. Even a Charlie Sheen cameo is inspired. At one point Malkovich enters himself through his own portal, which is kind of like being pulled down into the black hole of your own personality, and that trip results in one of the most peculiar single scenes I've ever seen in the movies.
Every once in a long, long while a movie comes along that is like no other. A movie that creates a new world for us and uses it to produce wonderful things. It stakes out a completely new place and colonizes it with limitless imagination.