Disappointment for a huge fan!

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Al Brick was a Fox cameraman who rose to prominence -- such as it was -- with half a dozen of the "Looney Lens" shorts, usually shown as one-minute clips in Fox newsreels. He would shoot various objects using, as the name of the series suggests, oddly shaped lenses.In this one, it looks like he shot a Manhattan street scene, concentrating on a skyscraper, through a beam splitter, and then rotated the two images independently. Beam splitting was one of the methods used to shoot color film in this period and was incorporated into the Technicolor monopack a decade later. Showing this piece would have been startling to the current audience, who were used to the idea that a camera recorded reality. Looking at this warped version would have been weird.