In telling a tale of love across time, Aronofsky is sometimes guilty of creating arty, pretentious psychobabble. But in visual terms, he's trying to expose his own raw, romantic heart. Folly? Maybe. But a risk worth taking.

The overall experience fails to satisfy on a basic level. This is one of those films it's easier to be impressed with than it is to like.

It's possible to admire or respect a movie without enjoying it too much, and that's partly the reaction I had to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. It's an incredibly ambitious film of sometimes thrilling visual achievement, but it didn't connect fully to my mind and nerves.

The movie would be more bearable without the unyielding score by Clint Mansell, which somehow melds the worst of Minimalism, art rock, and New Age music. It's what you'd hear if your massage therapist wanted to induce a stroke.

Bloated and logy, and art-directed within an inch of its life, the movie shovels heaps of phony portent and all-purpose mystical imagery onto a thin and maudlin plot.