Daaaaaalí !

Maybe the director's greatest feat here is that despite the five different actors and all the background nonsense, he makes the beloved, mercurial madman the most consistent presence amid all the other, far more normcore characters.

Either you enjoy 79 minutes of having absolutely no idea, none, of what might happen next, or you should avoid "Daaaaaalí!" But that would be such a shame. There is literally nothing else like this out there; and that means it deserves all our attention.

Silly and often disarming, Dupieux's presentation of his subject is a bit scattershot and even chaotic, and works more successfully in its subtexts regarding our reverence for the cult of personality and a normalized, overt disrespect for women.

At the time of year where every other film is a biopic chasing prestige respectability, we are lucky to have Quentin Dupieux, the prolific, serious-minded, silly filmmaker perfectly positioned to take a sledgehammer to the genre.

As one of the 21st century's most prominent surrealists (faint praise indeed, given his niche status), Dupieux was the perfect man to lead audiences on a victory lap through 20th-century surrealism's greatest hits.

An endlessly creative vision of art and cinema.

The most singular of the real-life selection from these fests has to be Quentin Dupieux's delirious Daaaaaali! (Shouting that title out loud is entirely apropos.).

Zany, absurd and silly, but forgettable and not quite as funny as Quentin's previous films.

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

A 'Waiting for Godot' riff on 'My dinner with Daaaaaali'...a brisk, bracing burlesque

This surrealistic homage to the master is laugh-out-loud funny, capturing him better than a straight biopic could possibly have done. After all, how do you catch lightning in a bottle?

"Daaaaaali!" is great fun and appropriately strange, with Dupieux delivering a dream-layered understanding of artistry and impatience with palpable glee.

If Daaaaaalí! reads more as an artistic experiment than a fully realized feature, perhaps Dupieux was aiming for that all along, a daring work that upends expectations at every turn. One hopes it's what Dalí would've wanted too.

Leave it to a filmmaker with absurdist tendencies to find a novel way to tell the story of a surrealist painter.

The result is an entertaining journey into the artistic chaos of genius and the necessity of luck and coincidence to even begin hoping to herd the cats that are Dalí's fractured visages of himself.

Bending time, space, dreams and whatnot to its own will, Daaaaaali! has some good jokes, but it's less hilarious than amusing, finding wittily inventive new approaches to an arguably over-familiar subject.

It's not a sophisticated bit, but Dupieux's commitment to illogical anti-humor remains pretty disarming.

As it satirizes fame and artistic appreciation, Dupieux's amusing script emphasizes narrative misdirection over substantial insight.

Dupieux is able to recognize and channel the alternately playful and arrogant spirit of Dali in ways that a conventional film simply couldn't.

If historical verisimilitude is what you're looking for, you won't find it here. But if it's surrealism, you seek…