Amelia Crashes and Burns

Looks like the pilots who overshot Minneapolis won't be the most-criticized aviators this weekend: Mira Nair's new movie about aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart is already under heavy fire from critics for what Variety's Justin Chang calls "timidity and lack of imagination." Joe Morgenstern, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says Amelia, starring Hillary Swank, elicits "the age-old question of why bad movies happen to good people," while The New York Times' Manohla Dargis calls the production "exasperatingly dull," saying that Nair never gives her subject "much of a personality." Rolling Stone's Peter Travers isn't much kinder when comparing the movie to the mysterious disappearance of the real Earhart: "The only mystery about this waxwork of a movie is why it was ever made."