The Majestic

A blacklisted Hollywood writer in 1954 (Jim Carrey) gets amnesia in a car crash, then wanders into a small town where he’s mistaken for a long lost war hero. Writer Michael Sloane and director Frank Darabont lift elements from The Front, Cinema Paradiso, Hail the Conquering Hero and It’s a Wonderful Life, smothering everything in a turgid solemnity all their own. Acting is good by the talented cast (Martin Landau, Laurie Holden, James Whitmore, David Ogden Stiers, Ron Rifkin), but the sentimentality is cheap and unworkable. After The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and now this, Darabont seems incapable of making a movie less than two-and-a-half hours long. Maybe it’s because he lingers over every second as if it were a golden treasure he just can’t bear to see pass.