Five stars for Moulin Rouge and now five stars for AI?

Advocate reviewers are really more like fetishists than critics - they take a cultlike approach to the movies, and if readers don’t agree, we obviously couldn't get beyond our conventional biases. First, there was your over-the-top endorsement of the frenetic-but-flawed Moulin Rouge, apparently the first movie your reviewer had ever seen. And now there’s the AI five star debacle. John Boonstra senses that he’s in for trouble with his fawning review of AI, but he covers his bases by asserting that those who don’t see what he sees in the film have "misunderstood." John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth was also misunderstood; I assume Mr. Boonstra adored that film also? The ending to AI is "courageous"? More powerful than the endings of Spartacus and Dr. Strangelove? Phrases that come to mind to describe the final 30 minutes of AI include "ponderous, unnecessary, heavy-handed, bad science, Spielberg-happy-face on dark-Kubrick-movie, kind-alien-cliche, focus group how-should-this-end meltdown," but not "courageous." What would have been truly courageous would have been to end the movie in the bottom of the ocean. There is no doubt that AI is a sincere tribute to Kubrick and a noble experiment. But to hail it as a masterpiece takes credibility away from both the movie and the reviewer. Once your reviewers get over the crushes they have on certain movies, they will be embarrassed by the hyperbole they spewed on readers.

Jon Reed, Northampton.