Calling All Experts on Southern Accents

I'm in NRO today with a review of the new Sean Penn/Jude Law/everyone else period political film (a handy euphemism for "Oscar bait"), All the King's Men. It paints some pretty pictures and stirs up a roaring tempest of righteous oratory, but it doesn't quite achieve greatness. Here's a sample:

The first act promises to explore the conflicts between power, personality, and the will of the people, but the subsequent two acts veer off course, never to return. As soon as Stark reaches office, the movie switches gears into a Law and Order style procedural tracking Burden's attempts to discredit a prominent judge and political opponent (Anthony Hopkins), then drops the investigative aspect entirely for a series of unearned twists and a final stab at grand tragedy. There are various zigs and zags in the story, including run-ins with an opponent's thug (James Gandolfini), a young, esteemed doctor (Mark Ruffalo), and the doctor's sister (Kate Winslet). With its heavyweight cast and immaculate photography by Pawel Edelman, some of the scenes can't help but crackle, but mostly the movie flounders under a narrative as gravelly and unnecessarily twisted as the old Louisiana roads throughout which Stark campaigns.

Read the whole thing at National Review Online.

Correction: I misspelled the director's name throughout the article. It is Steve Zaillian, not Steve Zallian.