A Beautiful Mind (2001)
Directed by Ron Howard (Apollo 13), Russell Crowe (Gladiator) and Jennifer Connelly (Requiem for a Dream), A Beautiful Mind tells the story of a man with a mind so brilliant that it changed the world – yet so broken that it would turn his own upside down.

John Nash is overbearingly confident, gifted, not exactly the most likable person – but still the tragic hero of his own story. A young and promising graduate of Princeton and recipient of a prestigious mathematics scholarship, John Nash easily rises through the academic ranks of MIT, publishing groundbreaking theories on the fly, and falls in love with his student, the gorgeous and intelligent Alicia Larde. Even more enticing to Nash, however, are the confidential missions being assigned to him by the Pentagon to decode secret Soviet enemy communications that he obsesses over… until the devastating cracks in his mind begin to show. Soon, everything in Nash’s world begins to crumble around him – becoming a prisoner of his own shattered mind, he begins to doubt if his own genius, if anything, is even real.

A Beautiful Mind is a masterpiece on every level – it could be called a drama, a romance, or even a psychological thriller, at times. The awe-inspiring downfall of Nash from the uncontested king of his own world to its pitiful victim is spectacularly played by Russell Crowe, who instead of presenting Nash melodramatically chose to do so with subtle nuances that make his performance all the more impressive. At the end of the day, A Beautiful Mind is a cruel paradox – to think that what brought a man to greatness was the very same thing that ruthlessly betrayed him is painful, to say the least. And so is watching this movie – although its premise is almost always bleak, it manages to place hope just over the horizon until the very end. Whether it all pays off or not, only you can find out by watching it.

Thank you for another great review! -Mrs. Long