The Great Gatsby

Directed by Baz Luhrmann

(PG-13)

**

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Cinema’s latest attempt to adapt F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most beloved novel is “worth seeing, the way a Cirque du Soleil show is worth seeing, or the Mardi Gras parade,” said Joanna Connors in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Filmed in garish 3-D by the same director who created Moulin Rouge!, it misses the book’s tone completely but is “packed to the very edges of the frame with lush, showy production design.” Leonardo DiCaprio proves to be “a more forceful Gatsby” than Robert Redford was in 1974, said David Denby in The New Yorker. He makes us believe in the bootlegger’s charm, as well as in Gatsby’s dream of winning Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), the girl he built his lavish life for. But the film’s hip-hop-flavored soundtrack and Baz Luhrmann’s “whooshing camera sweeps” prove mere distractions; even young audiences might prefer their Gatsby straight up. The movie’s biggest mistake is in making Gatsby a figure to envy, not pity, said Scott Foundas in Variety. Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel was an account of American decline, “not an invitation to the ball.”