Critic Reviews

The biggest takeaway from Daaaaaali!, as with all of Dupieux’s recent work, might be that he doesn’t expect us to ponder too much the questions he proposes. He’s a very funny filmmaker––funny-ha-ha, not arthouse funny––and I suspect he doesn’t want to distract more than necessary from his delightfully silly simple pleasures.

It’s a playful vision that allows for many contradictions — the superficial and the profound, the boring and the thrilling, the ugly and the beautiful — and for an endlessly creative vision of art and cinema.

Dupieux injects his own particular brand of daffy humor too, writing, directing, shooting and editing his movie, cutting it along a bias that is familiar to those of us who’ve been paying attention to his recent run of form.

Daaaaaalí! is less about Dalí himself, more about the difficulty of capturing his mercurial essence.

Daaaaaali! sure seems like the one movie that Dupieux was destined to make.

There’s madness afoot, and Demoustier ably captures how overmatched a mere interviewer would always be with Dalí. And the various actors playing Dalí indulge in grand vamping of the genius in a script that only occasionally hints at his sense of his own mortality.

Quentin Dupieux melts the frames that separate dream, film, and reality until they become one plate of tangled spaghetti.

The funniest thing about “Daaaaalí!” is how often Dupieux succeeds at tricking you into thinking that he’s about to zig when he’s clearly ready to zag. It’s not a sophisticated bit, but Dupieux’s commitment to illogical anti-humor remains pretty disarming.

Dupieux captures Dalí’s self-promoting genius but the constant trickery eventually becomes a little tiresome.