From Kyle Smith at the Toronto Film Festival

I’ve just seen “Nothing But the Truth,” Rod Lurie’s fictionalized version of the Valerie Plame story, which is so silly it’s practically a children’s book version of the exceedingly well-known facts, which I think we all got pretty sick of at least a year ago. The main characters, Kate Beckinsale as a reporter and Vera Farmiga as the Plame figure, spend so much time reading books to kids, dropping off their kids at school, and generally being Mothers with a capital M that the film has the aura of a Republican party ad from about 1960. The point is to pander to the Lifetime audience, which is going to find this endless mopefest far too dull for its taste.

Alan Alda, for the second time in this festival, plays a questionable lawyer (this time he’s telling the reporter to give up her source instead of rotting in jail; in “Flash of Genius,” in which Greg Kinnear plays an inventor whose idea for an intermittent windshield wiper is stolen by Ford, he played a lawyer who keeps telling Kinnear to settle for a few hundred grand, though he eventually won more than $20 million). Not to reveal too much, but in a (failed) effort to make about 400 conversations about whether Beckinsale should reveal her source for a story that revealed the wife of an ex-ambassador was in the CIA, director Lurie throws in a presidential assassination plot (which, though it is more interesting than anything else in the movie, is literally dropped after 30 seconds), a murderer who takes action because of his extreme right wing tendencies and a drunken chief of staff to the vice president. Hey, Scooter Libby, maybe you can be on the winning side of a legal case this time.