The careers of John Turturro and Stanley Tucci appear to be running a strikingly parallel course. Both known for their scene-stealing supporting work, they broke into directing with warm, deeply personal projects—Turturro with 1992's Mac, a carefully wrought working-class family drama, and Tucci with 1996's beloved ensemble piece, Big Night—and followed with overwrought, self-consciously theatrical period farces. Ironically, Tucci's The Impostors and Turturro's Illuminata suffer most from the directors' generosity toward their fellow actors, a quality that greatly enhanced their respective debuts. Originally intended for the stage, which would better accommodate its broad performances, Illuminata stars Turturro as an aspiring playwright for a New York City repertory company who struggles to get his high-minded new work produced. When he finally schemes a theater owner (Beverly D'Angelo) into giving it a run, with the woman he loves (Katherine Borowitz) in the leading role, the local critic (Christopher Walken) mercilessly savages it. But much like Bullets Over Broadway, he's taken under the wing of an aging star and admirer (Susan Sarandon), who opens up other professional and romantic possibilities. Illuminata riffs on the all-too-familiar intersections of stage and life with the sort of frenzied, zippy dialogue that's often mistaken for high wit (see Shakespeare In Love for a recent example). Turturro coaxes a fine, understated turn from Mac's Borowitz, but for a film that purports to celebrate acting, he encourages over-the-top performances from most of the cast, especially Walken and Ben Gazzara. Illuminata opens with artful images of marionettes at the mercy of the puppetmaster's strings, a peculiar metaphor for a movie in which the marionettes are rarely reigned in.