'The Reckoning'
Medieval times

LISTEN, YE merry gentlemen and -women, to this medieval tale of one former village priest (Paul Bettany) – deflowered, disgraced, defrocked, and finally dismissed – who takes up with a troupe of traveling thespians delighting towns with tales from the Old Testament. But hark, what do these players of the stage come upon but a young boy murdered; the culprit, a mute woman, sentenced to pay penance with her life! Seeds of doubt are soon sown in our young hero's mind; the same doubt also spurs the actors' leader (Willem Dafoe) to abandon biblical buffoonery and improvise a performance of her tragic story ("This will be how plays are made in times to come!" he exclaims, for performers were both ironists and precognitives in those days). Further evidence floats to the surface bit by bit, leading our man of faith and science to conclude the bloodstained fingers that took life belonging to another. Behind a narrative of death and the Dark Ages lies the hand of a sorcerer, one Paul McGuigan (Gangster No. 1), known for such alchemy as the rapid movement of images to mask slow-moving storytelling. Much ado of nothing is made, dramatically, in this matrimony molded like Umberto Eco's rose-naming and a future entertainment entitled CSI: Renaissance Faire. 'Tis not a bad film nor a good one, this fable of man's folly, but simply a middle road between; it offends little and thrills less, bidding one good morrow then leaving little trace of its treading upon one's mind. (David Fear)