Go to see The Illusionist for a reminder that film is magic.

Rating: 10/10 (9 October 2006)

So far, none of the "real' critics are suggesting this film as an Oscar possible, and I wonder why. It's not self-conscious like All the Kings Men, convoluted like Hollywoodland, or dragging heaps of unresolved issues behind it like The Departed. The Illusionist is satisfyingly complete and completely magical.
The plot carries you from an engrossing look at Eisenheim's--the illusionist's--childhood to his final appearance. His magical meeting with an old magician started him on this path, but like everything else,the stunning image of the magician plying his trade beneath a gnarled tree, comes to us second-hand, through a narrator. What should we believe? We can believe absolutely in the romance between the magician and his noble born beloved, a countess he met as a child. She was forbidden to play with him because he was a peasant, the son of a carpenter, but they managed to meet anyway. The same distance lies between them when they meet again as adults, but Eisenheim now possesses adult powers--or are they just tricks? As the plot takes you to its mesmerizing conclusion, you yearn to believe everything the illusionist does is real.
Edward Norton's performance gives the film a magnetic center, with great supporting players in his orbit. When Norton makes a little red ball roll lazily over the back of his hand and through his fingers, it looks as if he has been doing nothing but magic forever. The evil Prince (Rupert Sewall)is satisfyingly evil and Paul Giametti's inspector Uhl is convincingly drawn in by the illusionist, as we are.
A driving sense of urgency gives The Illusionist its power and makes it Oscar-worthy. Consumed by the events playing out before us, we're always enmeshed in the film's incredible beauty; the lush, inventive mise-en-scene, however, never seeks adulation because it's part of the whole, not an attempt to show how clever the director and/or cinematographer can be. Go to see this movie to remember what film can do best. It can create images that replay in your mind, like the two butterflies you'll still see after you leave the theater. It can remove you to an intact, other world, where you can revel in the playing out of human strengths and frailties. Although The Illusionist isn't overtly political and is set in the nineteenth-century, its themes of father/son battles over power, censorship, spiritualism versus materialism, and sustained love instead of carnal knowledge resonate today.