Alex in Wonderland

Dr Mazursky's 1.5. Having made a box-office killing with his directing debut Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Mazursky found he was Hollywood flavour of the month and, given virtual carte blanche, didn't know how to follow his success. His financially disastrous solution to the problem was to make a movie about his own predicament: Sutherland plays a self-obsessed director whose dreams of transcending the kind of Tinseltown escapism that made his first film a hit throw him into self-indulgent doubt. Should he make a movie about racism, revolution or pollution, or buy a better house? Mazursky's most deliberately 'arty' film lacks the ironic wit of his finest work, his awe of the freedom allowed the top European directors giving rise to a cameo for Fellini himself, who turns up to console Alex in his somewhat privileged quandary. But the performances are strong, Laszlo Kovacs's camerawork is impressively dreamlike, and it's an intriguing, if deeply flawed, study of the ambitions of a Hollywood hack who fancies himself an artist.