"...'a didactic fiction about cartography' made for French TV topromote a map exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, (and) a Borgesian metaphysical fantasy whose heroprogressively discovers that France is a life-size boardgame...At the outset of Snakes and Ladders, thetroubled hero (Patrick Bonitzer)-who is found to be vomiting out dice on one occasion, and shaken as dice byan enormous hand on another-discovers that 'he is the victim of the worst kind of nightmare, the didacticnightmare'. Some form of didacticism seems evident in every Ruiz project but, as with Borges, it is adidacticism which often parodies itself and becomes a form of camp, yielding precisely the sort ofnightmare that ensues when, through a delirium of literalism, thought becomes flesh and the universebecomes a brain dreaming thoughts yet unborn." Jonathan Rosenbaum, Monthly Film Bulletin