The result, disappointingly, is a scattershot work that is, by turns, entertaining and wearisome, energetic and hokey, delightfully evocative and cheaply sensational; dead-on in its conjuring of zeitgeist-y atmospherics, but often slow-footed and ham-handed in its orchestration of social details.

In the only arty shot, the Dalai Lama, seen in silhouette, sits at the schwerpunkt of a Mondrian-like composition."

But charlatans and vagarians never cease to appropriate scientific terms for their pseudologies.

Their will the tiger sucked, outraged the storm