Excursion into pinkish nostalgia, a swirl of forces, currents, ideas, and ideologies at play in New York in the 1930s, a two-ring circus (at the least) revolving around side-by-side cases of artistic censorship: the opening-night shutdown of a federally funded Left-wing Broadway musical and the effacement of Diego Rivera's Lenin-lionizing mural in Rockefeller Center. "A (mostly) true story," as it coyly labels itself, the movie wobbles under the weight of its ambition, wheezes in the trail of its Steadicam. The telescoping of actual events is of course covered under Artistic License, but the caricature of the likes of Orson Welles and John Houseman, not to mention character assassination of the likes of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, strays beyond the bounds. Sympathies and lack of same are fairly easy to sort out, and all the easier when you keep in mind that the filmmaker is Tim Robbins. Some of the characters manage to struggle to their feet as individuals rather than lie flat as representatives. Liveliest of these are Bill Murray (unsympathetic) as an over-the-hill anticommunist vaudevillian, earning his governmental stipend by tutoring two untalented ventriloquists, and John Turturro (sympathetic) as an antifascist Italian-American actor and fretful family man. The latter's "stage voice," in the defiant climactic performance of the forbidden musical, is a thrill unto itself. Barton Fink would have been proud of him. With Hank Azaria, Ruben Blades, Angus Macfadyen, Cary Elwes, Joan Cusack, John Cusack, Emily Watson, Susan Sarandon. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd