The Illusionist, however finely crafted, suffered from dispiriting performances. Scoop (pace my friend and occasional critical contributor to this page who reviewed it favorably) is merely another mark of Woody Allen's descent into insubstantiality. The Prestige is different. It is a conjuring-up of a Victorian world saturated with music hall trickery and science lab trials, where two rival magicians seek the ultimate illusion as an act of vengeance.

During a performance of a death-defying escape from a Chinese water-torture tank, Angier's wife fails to defy death due to a knot in the rope binding her hands that was tied by the well-meaning Borden. The trick's fabricator, Harry Cutter (Michael Caine), runs from the wings to break the water tank with an axe, but not quickly enough to save Angier's love.

From that moment on, Angier and Borden become the bitterest of enemies. In their search for the perfect stage deception they will create ingenious, and deadly, traps for the other. Their acts — Borden has become "The Professor" while Angier's stage name is "The Great Danton" — both focus on being a "transported man," seeking a means to achieve teleportation. In his quest to outdo Borden's illusion, Angier travels across the Atlantic and America to find the mad genius Nikola Tesla (David Bowie).

Anyone familiar with director Christopher Nolan's inventive film Memento will still not be fully prepared for the expert sleight-of-hand that he employs for his current film. The Prestige is a nonlinear narrative constructed from three points of view: Angier's, Borden's and Cutter's. This mirrors the three stages of an expert trick — "The Pledge," or the conjurer's setup, "The Turn," where the magician transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, and, finally, "The Prestige," the illusion's effect.

It is rare to find a film where the director's own pledge achieves prestige. But Nolan's film is the ordinary made extraordinary, with his adroit direction complemented by Wally Pfister's stunning cinematography and David Julyan's haunting, brooding soundscape. Then there are the performances. Bale and Jackman have never been better, with Jackman playing the polished colonial gentleman to Bale's rougher, White Chapel schemer.

Still, as bad as their characters' behavior becomes, driving each other toward the lip of an abyss, Jackman and Bale are never less than humans sadly self-trapped in the guises of superhumans.

Caine's Cutter is another of this master film actor's recent achievements, after Last Orders, The Ugly American and Children of Men. His Cutter desperately strives to remain a moral center in the brutal stage world that has been his home. As startling as it is to report, Jackman's Scoop co-star, the perennially vacuous Scarlett Johansson, also turns in a remarkably mature performance as Angier's assistant, Olivia Wenscombe. However, Rebecca Hall, as Borden's wife, Sarah, is the actress to watch, as her performance as a woman slowly poisoned by her husband's single-mindedness is beautifully subtle and painfully honest.

Perhaps the most surprising performance is David Bowie's Tesla. This is magic, as the rock icon completely transforms himself into a mild-mannered Croatian wizard of electricity.