Dream Scenario is a peculiar and provocative film with more ideas than it knows what to do with.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 15, 2024

The spectacle of Cage revelling in being boring is perversely entertaining in itself.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 11, 2024

This film is a thoughtful, funny and timely satirical dissection of the cancel culture age in which we live, lifted throughout by Cage’s performance. That he can act is something not even the US Internal Revenue Service can argue with.

| Jan 5, 2024

It's got a lot of real world truths to it, but [It's] not the most novel story in the world.

| Original Score: 6.5/10 | Dec 2, 2023

If I would recommend it at all, it would be just to see what Cage is doing here, which I think is really terrific.

| Original Score: 6.2/10 | Dec 2, 2023

Nicolas Cage is everywhere all at once in this dark and brilliantly doolally satire.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 1, 2023

Cage, recommitted the last few years after spending ages on Hollywood's fringes, dials down his mania and lets everything around him be eccentric and outlandish; he's the straight man in this oddball world, and it suits him well.

| Original Score: A- | Nov 30, 2023

I like this film very much... Think of it as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Being John Malkovich, neither of which nailed the landing. This one does.

| Nov 29, 2023

A hilariously discombobulating movie that also has the best Cage performance in years.

| Nov 24, 2023

The director has an imagination for deep-sleep surrealism as well as a stomach for gutsy satire.

| Nov 21, 2023

These flaws are real, and yet there’s still something about Dream Scenario that resonates—a feeling for our contemporary, Milkshake-ducked zeitgeist that ultimately gives its allegory about the fleeting nature of fame a bit of staying power...

| Nov 17, 2023

Dream Scenario expands into a larger commentary about how even our dreams can be co-opted and exploited, and we’ll leave it at that.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 17, 2023

I don’t think the third act of “Dream Scenario” works at all. It’s too obvious. However, its saving grace is Cage, whose petulance in these late sequences never ceases to be as funny as it is uncomfortable to watch.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 17, 2023

Nicolas Cage goes delightfully, derangedly meta in Dream Scenario, a smart, dizzyingly entertaining horror-comedy that morphs into scathing social satire.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 15, 2023

It’s a savagely funny showcase for Cage at his very best.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 12, 2023

If Dream Scenario didn’t evince such potential in its concept, performances, and craft, its thematic issues and second-half problems wouldn’t sting quite so badly.

| Original Score: B- | Nov 11, 2023

Luckily, a central performance by Nicolas Cage as a mild-mannered academic watching his dignity get demolished keeps us watching. He is both the movie’s greatest weapon and, at times, too good for it.

| Nov 11, 2023

Cage carries all with a blend of existential desperation and creepy ineffectualness (most memorably in the year’s most squalidly uncomfortable sex scene).

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 10, 2023

In the end, “Dream Scenario” is what it criticizes, but with no great statement or great pivotal scene, just intriguing, oddball amusement. The movie isn’t just about memes; it is a meme.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 10, 2023

It’s a morality play where one extramarital indiscretion produces disquieting ripples through the collective psyche of a country. Crucially it’s also funny.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 10, 2023