Recount

Director Jay Roach and writer Danny Strong do a superb job of putting you back in the 36-day marathon about the outcome of the 2000 presidential election in Florida. Don't want to go there? You'll miss a brilliant cast headed by Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary.

Smart, star-studded and anchored by another fine-tuned performance from Kevin Spacey, Recount finds the sweet spot between theatrical fare and TV that's precisely the constituency HBO wants to reach.

Recount, an efficient and relentless enactment of the strategists on both sides of the Florida controversy, shows an accident that was waiting to happen

While it's not a great TV movie--it's basically a high-class Movie of the Week, a docudrama that dramatizes events you'll recall from the news at the time if you were following it--it's nonetheless a gripping recounting (ha!) of a Presidential drama that was pretty gripping at the time to begin with.

Recount effectively dramatizes that struggle, mixing a true-to-life script with real news footage.

It has so much political minutiae to get through--the hanging chads, the vote-counting procedures, the legal maneuverings, etc.--that the characters get short shrift.

HBO's Recount fails. Invented dialogue and actions attributed to real-world figures play side by side with, and are indistinguishable from, verifiable actions and events that took place in Florida in 2000.