The great pleasure of this movie is in what performers Sinise and John Malkovich, Ray Walton and others do with it; what director Sinise does with it; and, perhaps most important, what screenwriter Horton Foote does with it.

I would not have thought I could believe the line about the rabbits one more time, but this movie made me do it, as Lennie asks about the farm they'll own one day, and George says, yes, it will be just as they've imagined it.

Happily, director/star/co-producer Gary Sinise has approached it not with the awe of an English professor, but with the practical eye of a craftsman: Here are solid characters, a taut and emotional story, a beginning, a middle and a wrenching end.

Of Mice and Men is a mournful, distantly heard lament for the loss of American innocence.

Well-mounted and very traditional, Of Mice and Men honorably serves John Steinbeck's classic story of two Depression-era drifters without bringing anything new to it.