It's great, then it gets boring. Then it's great again. Then boring... The performances are all over the place and mostly over the top (Jude Law is having the most fun it seems). Oscar bait gone wrong.

**1/2 / ***** (C-)

Mostly it is just boring.

Genius

It was alright, but quite dull (not surprising since it is made by a theatre director) and it is not about a topic that particularly interests me, though I was not outright bored. There is value there. But if the story could have had more in the way of excitement or obstacles for the main characters to overcome it may have been better, but it was just scene after scene about the relationship between Perkins and Wolfe and how Wolfe's second book, Of Time and River, took shape and was cut down from 5,000 pages to a normal print length.

I had to laugh how for an American story set in Manhattan, with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, they chose three English and two Aussie actors to play the leads. Laura Linney was the only Yank! Not that it matters. Acting is exactly that; acting, but it made me chuckle. I mean, Colin Firth's American accent comes and goes, and Jude was clearly struggling to maintain it with every line. I'm not even sure Guy Pearce was using an accent. Nicole Kidman certainly wasn't.

C-