Academy Award winner for Best Picture begins at Princeton, 1947, where mathematician John Nash (played by Russell Crowe) is flailing away at an economics theory while all his male classmates just want to get laid (the film equates the average Princeton male to the type of guys usually found on TV's "Happy Days"). Five years later, Nash is working with the Pentagon on numerical formation patterns and appears to be pulled into a conspiracy plot to thwart the Russians from detonating their H-Bomb on American soil. It isn't surprising that "A Beautiful Mind" won the Oscar; it has been designed specifically for prestige (i.e., awards). However, it's a sentimental, dramatic package which gives its time-worn movie theme--mental illness--a few new twists courtesy screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, adapting Sylvia Nasar's biography of John Forbes Nash Jr. (the Academy normally frowns upon edgy concepts, yet this one has an old-fashioned set-up, which they welcome, plus a lead performance preconceived to be a triumph). After a rocky first hour, the picture does improve. Howard methodically sets up the plot mechanisms, but gives us a fascinating main character who is disconnected, a failure at social interaction, and a really bad first date. Nash's future-wife (Jennifer Connelly) isn't particularly intriguing or enchanting (she has dim thoughts, such as "God must be a painter, why else would there be so many colors?"). Still, by the second act, Nash's personal crisis has become more clear to us, more involving and gripping, and Crowe isn't so much deliberately one-note as he is intensely focused (the actorly tics come later...and, when they do, they are almost endearing). The film has that slick look of "grand entertainment" that makes critics bow their heads, yet there are indeed miraculous moments: Nash neglecting to take his medicine and discovering an entire covert operation going down in his backyard shed; Nash, recuperating, riding his bicycle in an infinity pattern, scribbling numbers in the air with his finger. The mental institution stuff is the cinematic equivalent of treading water (and wastes Christopher Plummer as a doctor), but the last half of the film is quite good: a brilliant but disturbed professor working his damnedest to overcome his demons, helped along by a loving woman and receiving the kind of respect he never dreamed of. Howard isn't always graceful or sensitive (especially in the electric shock sequence), but he does resurrect a tired genre and ultimately makes it a moving experience. *** from ****