An intriguing, fascinating, often exhausting and flawed tale

Rating: Null/10 (30 December 2015)

Overall, a pretty great film that manages to work on both a story-telling level and on a character level, despite how busy it all is. The problem is in essence how busy it all is when it didn't need to. All of the side-explanations, the wink-wink, fourth-wall breaking stuff should not have been there. It was all meant for humor more than actual explanations, and that's fine in aim. It just wasn't funny and felt both condescending and just really annoying. The screenplay did a fine job of really telling this story so all of that was just distracting. I also think the editing at times attempts to show off just for the sake of it, but it also was able to provide the story with a much- needed pace. It's a conflicting editing achievement, no doubt. I think both Christian Bale and Steve Carrell provide some fine work, the latter in particular is more convincing here than he was in last year's Foxcatcher. Both are the emotional anchors of the story and they do very well. The entire cast is superb though, and really gives the Spotlight cast a run for their money.