The pleasantest surprise of the current New York Film Festival may well be Carlos Saura's "The Garden of Delights."…

Recent (i.e. 1930's) Spanish politics are by no means absent from "The Garden of Delights," but now they are made explicit and they become dramatically useful to the Pirandellian permutations of a brilliantly playful and wonderfully funny comic invention….

The crucial moments [involving the paralyzed Antonio's attempts to remember the number of his Swiss bank account] are so ludicrously, so elaborately miscalculated … that they would drive the soundest mind to amnesia. But Antonio makes some progress….

I have my doubts about the machine shop and about much of the movie-mechanical whimsey in "The Garden of Delights," but not about its fantastic sense of character situation. For the best dramatic moments are those that Antonio begins spinning out of his own head—wickedly erotic, or simply wicked—that constitute a totally private, perfectly obsessive world.