It’s hard to make a bad Howard Hughes movie, but Warren Beatty has pulled it off with Rules Don’t Apply, the first movie he’s directed in 18 years and the first movie in which he’s acted in 15. He is being treated kindly by the press for this calamity of a motion picture, for which there is no excuse save his advanced age, his remembered glamour, and his left-wing politics. You pick.

Howard Hughes has been one of the most reliable real-life subjects the movies have ever seen. Start with the gorgeous and fanciful Melvin and Howard from 1980, which accepts as true the almost certainly false claim by a man named Melvin Dummar that he picked up a hitchhiking Hughes one night outside Las Vegas and found himself the heir to the billionaire’s fortune. Jason Robards plays Hughes as a bitter and homeless drifter transformed for a moment by an ordinary person’s kindness in one of American cinema’s most touching comedies.