Rules Don't Apply to this oddball late career entry from Warren Beatty. A charmingly pedestrian glimpse into yet another facet of Howard Hughes life story, overlaid with a soupçon of romance, all dressed up in glamourous period patina. Features a parade of guest stars, such as the inimitable Steve Coogan as Colonel Nigel Briggs. It's just good. *B*

Howard Hughes- 52
Warren Beatty- 79

There is no reason whatsoever for him to play that role. It hurts the film artistically and financially. From a man whose career has Ishtar and Town and Country to pick from, this very well be the worst decision he has ever made. Which is a shame because it's not bad. I guess he felt he couldn't just do a Hughes film because of The Aviator.

Beatty is looking great for 79, plus he naturally uses artful lighting in Rules Don't Apply. His portrayal of Howard Hughes from ages 53-60 is just fine.

He looks great for 79. It doesn't mean he should be playing a vibrant 52 year old Hughes. But that's neither here nor there, because he is more than fine in the role. But I think someone else would've killed in the role, and the rest is just meh to blah. It all just seems rather lazy on his part. I'd rather him acting in films not directed by him.

Warren Beatty is playing Hughes from 1958 - 1972 in Rules Don't Apply, age 53 to age 66 over the course of this movie. "Vibrant" would have been a great word to describe Howard Hughes in his 30's - but not in his 50's and 60's when he was deep into his eccentricity and physical decline. He died at age 70 in 1976.

Fifteen long years after his prior film as an actor (the legendary flop Town & Country), Warren Beatty belatedly returns in front of and behind the camera with the delightful Rules Don't Apply. The film represents an improbable, but ultimately charming and productive collision of energies and tonalities: Beatty himself plays an aging Howard Hughes, transitioning in the mid- to late-50s from mercurial and secretive entrepreneur to outright recluse, but the story also includes two comparatively minor players in his orbit of delusion and wealth. One is an idealistic Virginia girl (Lily Collins); as the film opens, she travels westward to join Hughes' legion of beauties under contract. The other is her appointed driver (Alden Ehrenreich), who will be fired if he initiates a romance with a client. He hopes to convince Hughes, whom he has never met, to invest in a real-estate project.

This farce-melodrama hybrid is profoundly nostalgic for the sound and texture of a bygone California, but it also has a biting contempt for the period's constrictions and hypocrisies. Rather than pursuing headlong any single plot point, the film is fashioned as a tapestry, alternately providing time and space to explore the character's religious beliefs, Hughes' volatile finances, the camaraderie shared by the women under interminable contract and waiting for roles never to come, etc. Beatty is sensational as Hughes, easily transitioning from larger-than-life charisma to aching vulnerability to frightening psychosis as rapidly as the real man reportedly did. Inevitable attempts to read the fastidious, never-prolific performer's turn as covertly autobiographical or at least personal only increases its fascination and magnetism. And his youthful co-leads hold their own, sharing a subdued, but sweet chemistry. This is the first time Collins truly registers as the star the industry has repeatedly tried to convince us she is; at her best here, she rivets the camera with an unblemished charm and grace reminiscent of Judy Garland or Audrey Hepburn.

The film, clearly produced to satisfy a muse and not for an obvious mainstream demographic, has a few notable flaws. Scenes during the first 15 to 20 minutes are edited too anxiously, ending several beats too soon (almost mid-sentence once or twice) to expedite the introduction of the characters and their intertwined subplots. And Beatty may have recruited too many A-list friends for borderline non-parts: is it an enhancement or a distraction when a 50-second character who could be called Older Gentleman at the Dinner Table is played by an actor as notable as Ed Harris versus an unknown player? In general, though, this is a idiosyncratic and grandly entertaining picture and a welcome return to the fold by one of contemporary American cinema's most iconic figures.

A-