Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997)

Ebert praises Morris's film as a magical meditation on four eccentric men pursuing control in odd ways: a lion tamer, topiary gardener, mole-rat expert, and robot scientist. He highlights how Morris weaves their stories with music and varied imagery into a haunting, memorable reflection on life and human endeavor.

Maslin calls Morris's documentary delightfully exotic as it explores four visionaries and their ideas about behavior and control. She singles out the director's ability to meld science, philosophy, poetry, and whimsy into haunting connections among man, beast, and machine, with elegant photography and music.

This is one of the finest and most unforgettable films of the 1990s, improbably weaving together stories of a lion tamer, robot inventor, topiarist and mole-rat expert through dazzling editing and visuals. It ultimately succeeds on a profound philosophical level by exploring distinctions in consciousness.

Morris crafts a delightful documentary by interviewing four unconnected men about their obsessive vocations and cross-cutting between them for unexpected contrasts. The sincerity of the subjects and the director's ingenuity, along with striking imagery, make the offbeat structure appealing.

The film is a difficult and thought-provoking piece that will probably puzzle more than enlighten. It is also an unforgettable, funny, strangely rewarding, unique exercise built around interviews with four unusual men whose stories are interwoven like a fugue.

The review finds the film humorously inventive and wildly original, an unclassifiable meditation on dreams, endeavor, and the future of life. It praises the stylistic experimentation and visual approach but notes that the cerebral focus leaves viewer response strictly intellectual, with little heart.

The critic calls the film Morris’s strangest mishmash of a surreal, visual essay. Yet the director finds a way to make it coherent and profound.