In that sense, the ideal Ruiz project is his often sublime 1999 visualization of Time Regained, where Proust's themes of slippery memory weren't so much adapted for the screen as used as the flame which kept the director's own magic-lantern show reshaping itself over and over. Similarly adapted from a literary sprawler, Mysteries of Lisbon only occasionally hits the earlier film's levels of boldness, yet it nevertheless finds Ruiz in plangent form, offering a sumptuous and fluid work that, at its best, gives the elating impression of flipping through a book as the pages evaporate into smoke."