Nicolas Cage returning to the dementedly charming fare that marked his early career is somehow reassuring in a desperately uncertain world. Just as 2022’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent was a psychic balm for a post-lockdown world, Dream Scenario is, in a way, the perfect 2023 movie. Cage is a tedious tenured professor who bores all he meets but, for some reason, starts turning up in their dreams. Then the world’s dreams. The dreams are weird, to be sure, with explosions and alligators, but he’s just kind of hanging out. Of course he gets famous, his lectures are packed and he’s loving his life, but then the dreams get nasty. Really, really nasty. And he is not behaving well. He tortures. He murders. He’s Freddy Krueger in a cardi. This is about social media memes, the strangeness of dreams, the fickle nature of fame and Cage’s take on Cage. But at a real and very fundamental level, it’s an offbeat, funny Nicolas Cage movie. And that’s what we need right now.