John Boorman is an intoxicated moviemaker, with a wonderful kind of zeal -- a greed to encompass more and more and more in his pictures... I don’t know-of any other director who puts such a burnish on his obsessions.

Excalibur is full of visual fustian -- flames in the night, mist rising ominously from the ground, bits of klutzy magic. Yet, despite all the rhetoric, the movie never takes off.

Boorman reveals a wonderfully individual gift for embodying the mystical and the magical.

Director John Boorman contrasts the lush beauty of his landscapes with the violence of the men who inhabit them. While the film's imagery is imbued with a dreamlike sheen, this is a world in which prophecies are serious business.