Cradle Will Rock

Stunningly cinematic and audacious on every level, writer/director Tim Robbins's look at the collision of the Depression-era art world and politics may well be a masterpiece.

Commands respect as mainstream filmmaking with more of an agenda than just pimping cinematic junk food to the brain-dead masses.

Brings the '30s vividly to the screen.

Cradle Will Rock is the masterpiece that wasn't, a magnificent opportunity blown to hell.

Thoroughly artificial and overly schematic, to the point of caricature even, but often lively and witty nonetheless.

Historical forces and famous ghosts jostle past each other in this evocation of mid-1930s New York like harried commuters at Grand Central Station.

There is hardly a moment during this overlong, stunningly smug exercise in moral self-satisfaction when you actually care about a character, real or invented.