Game 6

This is DeLillo's first produced screenplay, but he has written for the stage, and perhaps his portrait of Steven Schwimmer (Robert Downey Jr.), the detested critic, is drawn from life.

Keaton's so good you almost forget how wonderful Downey is as Steven Schwimmer.

A modest but agreeable, and often very funny, movie.

All this stuff is enacted by a better-than-reliable cast (Griffin Dunne, Robert Downey Jr., Catherine O'Hara, Roger Rees, and more), so Game 6 is never a bore. But it's not much more besides never a bore.

The movie includes a recurring motif of immigrant taxi drivers - like them, the movie is constantly going around in circles.

Game 6, the first screenplay by one of America's great living novelists, Don DeLillo, is poorly served by Michael Hoffman's flat, soporific direction.

DeLillo felt he needed a plot, and he invented one that is shockingly bad for a novelist of his accomplishment. It isn't the use of a plot that degrades the picture: it is the degrading plot itself--which isn't even a good cartoon of a too-busy plot.