Generally a sharper script than it’s got credit for. I was struck by the rhyming of the two final scenes: Cheadle planting the bug followed by Douglas announcing in the group meeting that he’s “here to listen”. Its productive, Soderberghian tendencies knock against its worst: Douglas inhabiting the “my daughter, the addict” storyline blunts the procedural material’s impact, his first days on the job as drug czar a blind-man-and-the-elephant evocation of the narco-state’s vastness. Also, a pre-9/11, post-Clinton film that…

Rather baffled by reviews of this, which seem to discount the possibility that any film hitting the same historical-epic-romance beats as TITANIC or PEARL HARBOR could possibly be interesting while doing such. The pans have rightly honed in on the second-act climax in the arena (a sequence so long and emotionally exhausting it seems, in retrospect, to consume the entire movie) as Anderson at his peak, but this is not the only locale where POMPEII is worthy of our praise.…