A Beautiful Mind

Ultimately the message is banal and rather repellent: brainwork wrecks your health.

Crowe is called upon to do not much more than stare solicitously at the heavens, from where inspiration duly arrives, to the accompaniment of some predictably celestial music.

A Beautiful Mind is Howard's best movie, and easily one of the best movies of the year.

It's not a crime for the script to gloss over the thornier aspects of Nash's story, but the film seems totally unconvincing, squeezing a real life into a formula that's simultaneously more palatable and less interesting.

A Beautiful Mind is not an insult to the intelligence, not quite. But it makes every effort to celebrate that uncommon faculty and at the same time play it down to the lowest common level.

The result is one of the most successful attempts to make math look sexy, even if the movie strays - gallops, really - from the details of the actual life of Nobel Prize-winner John Forbes Nash Jr.

Director Ron Howard has loosened up enough to imbue the project with a jangled-nerve approach that paradoxically allows us to feel like both observers and participants in Nash’s never-ending struggles with his own mind.

When I think of the phrase “Oscar bait,” an expression I’m honestly not fond of, Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind is the first movie I always think of.

Nash's character is perfectly suited to Crowe's ability to charm and confuse at the same moment.

Its inspirational qualities to read more about the real John Nash (and all the things omitted from this biopic) might be the only lasting effect.