Oil-and-water mixture of tough-talking film noir and whimsical fairy tale (a man transmogrified into a sausage, a bilingual talking dog, and the like), set in the early days of the Atomic Age. Clare Peploe, a brainy director, musters neither the tone nor the atmosphere in which either sort of narrative might thrive separately, much less together. A concern with the different kinds, degrees, and definitions of magic gives the movie at least a semantic dimension. With Bridget Fonda, Russell Crowe, Jim Broadbent, D.W. Moffett, Paul Rodriguez. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
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