Pretty appealing movie, with the same studied (potentially precious) weirdness that inspired DiCillo's Living In Oblivion and blew apart The Real Blonde - this movie ends up somewhere in between, often successful scene by scene but finally pretty inconsequential assessed as a whole. Still, at least DiCillo doesn't overdo the extent of Turturro's ultimate character revelation - it's a modest synthesis (and on TV we see the minister who tried to convert Turturro being dragged to jail for murdering some errant parishioners - proving the fragility of easy solutions). Maybe the movie goes too enthusiastically for easy tricks like Turturro seeing things running backwards in his desire to stop time, but the main appeal is in the unhurried pace and the nuances of Turturro's boxed-in existence, and then in the oddity of the details. Robards is a bit too much of a standard-issue holy fool, designed to show the way to true spiritual wealth, but the two make a good pair (although the details of Turturro's regeneration - nude bathing, raw tomatoes off the vine, free sex - are again less than original).
Review of Box of Moonlight
