Winter's Tale (2014)

"Winter’s Tale is a sweet, grown up fairy tale that begs to inspire wonder, but plummets back to earth just as it begins to grow wings. It stars Colin Farrell as Peter Lake, a petty thief in industrial-era New York who becomes an unwitting pawn in a celestial battle for souls. After robbing, then falling in love with, the doomed Beverly (Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown-Findlay), his demonic former employer Pearly Soames (a stocky Russell Crowe sporting an Irish brogue that borders on the satirical) tries to dispatch them both. With the help of a mysterious white horse, Peter survives to find that miraculously a hundred years have passed and he has become a bearded drifter with no memory of his past."

"A cloying, sledgehammer-subtle adaptation of Mark Helprin's vastly richer novel."

"Since this marks the directorial debut of Hollywood hack Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), there’s a heavy foot applied to the era-skipping leaps made by source novelist Mark Helprin."

"Clumsy and inert, a lumbering white elephant rather than the flying white horse that is the novel's magical mascot."

"It’s a greeting card of film, full of platitudes and pleasant imagery, and destined to be thrown in a drawer and forgotten in short order."

"It's pretty, with wintry white locations and settings, but made with an unrelentingly heightened atmosphere, every scene a climax drizzled with a treacly score."

"An ineffectual account of an eternal love."