I should know better

I took myself off to see THE ILLUSIONIST for some light relief, and that`s exactly what it was. Well=plotted and well-acted, the tale was told, and you were invited, with the detective, to guess what really happened, with the clue all along in the title. Possibilities of investigating the interface of life and illusion any more deeply were sidestepped throughout.

It had more than a whiff of Ruritania, and I found myself easily slipping it back half a century and populating it with Mason, Grainger, and perhaps Bergman with her inimitable dignity in impossible situations.

I found myself enjoying it more than THE PRESTIGE, a darker and better film about magicians and illusion, and was at a loss to know why until I realised that it was the absence of Michael Caine. For me he serves as an irritant, as he can only play himself, and what worked so well for Connery seems to make Caine stick out in any screenplay that isn`t deliberately written around him, like a polaroid pinned to the wall in an exhibition of watercolours.