Cloud Atlas

Directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer

(R)

**

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The best thing that can be said about this hugely ambitious film is that it will create arguments, said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. “Its fans, I suspect, will consume the movie time and again” to savor the many links among its six interwoven stories, all taken from David Mitchell’s acclaimed 2004 novel. But no matter how amusing it is to watch a clutch of actors change makeup and accents as the scene shifts from a 19th-century sea voyage to a contemporary British nursing home to South Korea in 2144, even the best scenes are weighed down by an over-insistent theme: “the startling news that we are all connected.” It’s impossible to hate the entire package, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph (U.K.). “If you don’t like Tom Hanks playing a tattooed island primitive,” you’ve got four other Tom Hanks performances to choose from, plus Halle Berry as a 1970s reporter and Hugh Grant “clearly having a blast” playing several villains. But the directors seem to have made this formally complex movie merely “to prove they could,” said Richard Corliss in Time. Measured by emotional impact, it’s “an inch deep.”