THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN 11AM AND 3PM

The film Alexander has just entered its second agonising hour...
Me: "God, this film is awful."
Richard: "It's not. It's just not. There's plenty."
Me: "I think I see where they're going with this."
Richard: "What?"
Me: "Jared Leto is in love with Alexander, and he's looking at him marrying his new wife. So, here's what's gonna happen..."
Richard: "What's gonna happen?"
Me: "Alexander is going to find his wife with her neck slit open in bed, and written in blood on the wall above will be 'MEET ME AT THE MOUNTAIN TOP, so Alexander will have to fight Jared Leto on the mountain where they trained as kids. There will be…

Every movie enthusiast is familiar with the feeling of admiring a movie that everybody else seems to despise. Most of us have quite a few of those. I certainly have my fair share, but the movie that immediately pops into my mind in such discussions is Oliver Stone’s "Alexander".

Most critics panned the theatrical version, the box office was a letdown and it even got 6 Razzie Award nominations. This movie was on almost every level a complete failure. Flawed as it was, I did not quite get why. But then again I was only a teenager, what did I know?

In 2007, Oliver Stone released his Final Cut, which he called "Alexander Revisited". I only got around to watch…

A suitably rousing epic that compels despite its issues with script and production, Oliver Stone's "Alexander" provides a full-bodied cinematic experience. Sweeping and, on occasion, stirring, Stone's film appeals as a solid observation of the deeds of a larger-than-life conqueror.

Beginning three centuries before the so-called common era, "Alexander" tells the story of the Macedonian King who led his armies through Asia, piecing together an empire for the ages. The film splits its narrative focus between the youth of Alexander and his conquest of the much of the known world.

Starring Colin Farrell as Alexander, Stone is never able to get under the King's skin. Though the film attempts to pay attention to Alexander's bed-hopping internal turmoil, the audience is…

[Ultimate Cut.] Consider me a fan -- of Oliver Stone, one of our most energetic and resourceful filmmakers, and even of this, which is of course as much of a mess as everyone says it is, but one full of more ideas about its hero, its own context, and its maker than the vast majority of other historical epics and/or biopics in recent memory. There's a great deal of psychological interest. Maybe the drama unfolds in fits and starts at some points, but the emotional logic Stone goes for, here and always, has a wonderful match in his method, in his love of filling the screen with texts from cultural and historical archives, of storytellers and stories that unravel as…

Those were some accents alright. Oliver Stone's 'Alexander' is an extremely mixed bag, but one that, thanks to some spectacularly staged battle sequences and a committed Colin Farrell, amount to something greater than the sum of it's parts.

Stone loves his conspiracy theories, and of course he just had to inject some of his historical paranoia into his Alexander the Great biopic. I wouldn't have it any other way. Stone and Farrell capture the flaws of the great leader, and try their best to get to the center of what drove Alexander's ambitions over the edge.

Most of the star-studded cast are a letdown. Everyone from Jolie to Hopkins to Plummer to Leto are all saddled with bad accents and…