Skolimowski's bewildering The Adventures of Gerard was kept in cold storage for months before its appearance. One sees the problem. The film is too naive to be Art and too sophisticated to be Entertainment. It also looks as if Skolimowski made it up as he went along, not so improbably in the light of some of his own confessions ('Laziness lies behind everything I have done'). Gerard in fact is the sort of film that only an established director would be allowed to get away with….

The result is a sort of cross between [Sergei Bondarchuk's] Waterloo and [Richard Lester's] The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film…. Like Lester, however, who seems stylistically the nearest point of reference, Skolimowski aspires to complete visual anarchy ('a world gone topsy-turvy …' narrates Gerard's voice early on, and the camera gyrates to turn Napoleon's army upside down), breaking formal barriers to...