See it in one glorious shot, grab as much from it as you can and run like hell. I say that not because I hated Masked & Anonymous, but because I loved it.

If you dissect Masked line by line, it would be, like a Dylan song, indecipherable. But if you take the allegory as a whole, by simply asking the questions, it somehow makes a statement. Is it muddled? Yes. Imperfect? Sure. Impenetrable? Well, that's open to interpretation.

A strange and convoluted film that is as rewarding as a Dylan song, and just as perplexing.

Isn't a good movie, at least by any conventional definition of the word good. But it's not a bad movie, either. It's a Bob Dylan movie.

A fascinating, vexing, indulgent, visionary, pretentious, mesmerizing pop culture curio.

This one's painful.

For all its pretensions and avant-garde narrative dislocations, the star-studded cast...keeps this buzzing.

Requires tremendous restraint not to conclude that this entertainingly apocalyptic mess is about nothing, since it may well be about everything. But I doubt it.

A messy, ambitious comedy.

It's only when the film attempts to express its ideas in spoken English that logic dissolves into a muddle that would test the most rabid Dylanologist.

"Masked" is erratic and volatile, too, from scene to scene, moment to moment. The script is chaotic, but the top-flight actors play their hearts out.

The film strains for some kind of meaning, but asks you to do the work it can't and won't perform on its own.

Though Dylan shuffles through the dramatic sequences like a dessicated mummy, the music sequences are strikingly vibrant -- he's never looked worse or sounded better.

Only Giovanni Ribisi, with a back-of-the-bus speech about the betrayals of insurgent and counter-insurgent politics, finds a genuine moment. All the same, for some unfathomable reason, Dylan's autumnal self-salute is not particularly difficult to watch.