Most critics dismissed this as a pedant's pedestal, Robert Redford trying to tell us everything he hates about American politics and wrapping a thin veneer of narrative around it.

But it made its money back, and I actually think it was really good. Watching Streep and Cruise together gave me faint shivers like the watching De Niro and Pacino together in Heat, proof that the World's Biggest Star® has talent.

The sequences of the two soldiers are thrilling enough and that of Redford as a professor trying to encourage a gifted politics student not to fall by the wayside are dramatically well rendered. There's really nothing not to like in the three concurrent stories.

The journalist plot even breathes fresh life into the movie late in the stage when Streep comes up against the apathy of the American media, embodied by her boss (Dunn) who insists (against all her instincts) that she regurgitate Senator Irving's (Cruise) spin about how this time, things will really work out.

Well written, spectacularly, performed and worthy as a story and a comment.