A Beautiful Mind is satisfactory. That is about the most soaring adjective I can come up with; in a better world, then, I would be damning the movie with faint praise, but in fact since most Hollywood movies these days are decidedly unsatisfactory you can take that as a recommendation, if not a wild one, that you fork over some of your hard-earned moolah and watch this flick.

It is a middle-of-the-road movie about a far-out topic; it is a meat-and-potatoes approach to a subject as delicate as sushi. Certainly one would have enjoyed a more adventurous and transcendent approach to a movie about mathematicians, but at least "A Beautiful Mind" succeeds in its modest way at drawing us into a difficult and not-inherently-dramatic story. The movie is leagues better than the edgier Pi (1998), which tried to illuminate math with an artsier touch.

I'll leave it to others to describe in detail the astonishing make-up and acting work that turns Russell Crowe, successfully, into a 70-year old man.

A Beautiful Mind is certainly no masterpiece of cinema, but in an era when most movies are painfully dull and vulgar, it is pleasing to sit in a theatre full of patrons enjoying the modest intellectual charms of this film.