Hilary Swank: 'Amelia'

Academy Award–winning actress Hilary Swank delivers a "feisty" performance as the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart in Mira Nair's new biopic Amelia, said Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel. The story of Earhart is quite "moving," and this occasionally "thrilling and poetic" film boasts "magnificent period settings" and "majestic aerial photography." (watch the trailer for Amelia)

There is some visual "pleasure to be had" while taking in the film's "classic '30s fashions," said Robert W. Butler in the Kansas City Star, and Hilary Swank does hand in a "solid" performance. But Amelia ""never really soars," and some of the "big questions" about Earhart are never answered, like whether she was "lesbian or bisexual," or what happened following her crash in the middle of the Pacific.

Amelia is a "biopic on autopilot", said Associated Press writer David Germain in Newsday.com. This "dowdy movie" features a "stumbling, choppy" structure, and leaves its subject "remote and muted," thanks to dialogue that ranges from "languid to soporific." And even Swank is "out of her skin" as Earhart—she's "drab, distant" and "utterly uninvolving."

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Also opening this week: Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant; Antichrist, Astroboy