With the corridors, galleries, sweeping staircases, and grand ballrooms of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg for a setting (all those paintings! all those statues! all that culture!), with a cast of thousands of lavishly costumed actors and actresses including several orchestras and various troupes of dancers, with all this and more at his disposal for one day only, cinematographer Tillman Buttner finally succeeded, after two failed attempts, in performing the virtuoso bravura stunt of taking a single unbroken 96-minute Steadicam shot that leads us through every room in the museum in the guise of a ghostly time traveler who speculates philosophically as he is given glimpses into three centuries of Russian history, but sadly, the wonder I felt at Buttner's feat of technique was quickly suffocated under the numbness of sensory overload (all those paintings! all those statues! all that culture!), and near the end, when I wasn't looking at my watch, I felt vaguely threatened by the excess of pomp and pretense unrolling on the screen in front of me, much as you might feel vaguely threatened in a nightmare if Liberace's entire wardrobe, brought to life by some evil sorcerer, surrounded you in an ostentatious danse macabre of silk and sequins.