Winter’s Tale (2014)

“Winter’s Tale” is brain-killing romantic tripe with late-30s Colin Farrell as a 20-year-old (!!) street crook who falls for a young rich girl played by “Downton Abbey”’s Jessica Brown Findlay, the latter who dies of consumption in 1915. Add in time travel, a flying white horse, Russell Crowe -- awful, just awful -- as a demon with a gang of union thugs, Will Smith -- career worst awful -- as the most awkward hip-hop Satan ever, stars (as in suns, not actors) that are really souls of people, a magical princess bed that cures –- I shit you not -– little girl cancer, and none of that fuck-all mind-blow high-on-crack shit is as unbelievable as a 115-year-old NYC metro paper publisher paling around with a world famous food critic, both employed at newspapers in 2014. Shit. Really. Akavia Goldsman writes and directs, with all the talent of his “Batman and Robin” and “Avengers,” the 1998 Brit version. The ever-growing, Oscar-winning mediocre “Beautiful Mind,” making mental illness into spy game fun, seems his high point. D-