Opening April 13th

The Hoax
Grade: C+

Lasse Hallström (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) tries his hand at the con artist genre and falls miles short of recent gems like Catch Me If You Can and Shattered Glass. Based on real events that took place in the early 1970s, The Hoax depicts an outrageous literary scam in which writer Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) nearly pawned off a fabricated Howard Hughes autobiography on Life magazine and a major publishing company. Gere, Hope Davis, Alfred Molina and Marcia Gay give it the old college try, but they ultimately flounder because Hallström and screenwriter William Wheeler provide few reasons for us to care about the characters.