“The film’s central concept is the aversion most right thinking people have to the actor Nicolas Cage. And he accepts this mantle so honorably and humbly in this film that I think maybe now I quite like him. It’s an honest and comic performance and seems filled with all the genuine humiliations that one imagines Cage himself has suffered in the past ten years…One recommendation, though: Nicholas Hoult is almost grown and is possibly on the cusp of becoming better looking than the original teenage Leo DiCaprio.”

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Zadie Smith is a surprisingly engaging and astute film reviewer. (From “At the Multiplex, 2006” in her book Changing My Mind.)