It's exhilarating when a movie's formal gimmick really works, and Figgis's experiment of shooting a film in one day in one take with four cameras and then quartering the screen to show the four synchronized camera feeds simultaneously, hits the bullseye with several arrows. Time Code is an energetic and original Hollywood bitchslap in the vein of The Player that hones in on a single morning's worth of posing, schmoozing, whining, hot air releasing, deal-making, adultering and revenging at a small movie production company. Figgis's low-budget quickie snaps up strong performaces from quite a crowd of good actors, the most memorable being those of Stellan Starsgard as strung-out resident genius and player Alex, Jeanne Tripplehorn as a powerfully jealous sugar momma (to Salma Hayek's struggling actress), Saffron Burrows as Alex's estranged wife, and Mia Maestro as diva auteur Ana Pauls. The pretentious art film that Pauls pitches to the company, which will use four cameras to replace the stale aesthetics of montage with vibrant collage, is of course a wry description of Time Code itself, and this reflexive humor allows Figgis to have his arty ambitions and laugh at them too. And indeed it is the four-barrelled collage effect that gives the movie its feeling of an embarrassment of riches, the thrill of several luxurious performances to take in literally at once, such that you never really have time to tire of any character and wish you had had more time with several. By contrast the empty flash of the equally energetic Run Lola Run, in which the three successive montage versions of the same story cancel each other out and add up to nothing, seems utterly flat. Time Code's well-acted multiple-character focus and natural-disaster-punctuated California mellow-stupido ambiance recall Robert Altman's and Paul Thomas Anderson's tour de force ensemble epics, without needing three-plus hours to get there.