In his review of Curtis Hanson‘s Too Big To Fail (HBO, debuting on Monday, 5.23), Media Life’s Tom Conroy notes the “paradox of [how] good historical dramas can be engrossing and suspenseful even when we already know that, for example, Apollo 13 is going to land safely and Mark Zuckerberg is going to wind up running Facebook.

The docudrama “tells a story that might seem unfilmable — the near collapse of the American economy in 2008,” he writes. “[But] the cast of well-known and, more importantly, skilled actors, though somewhat distracting, helps to make the movie both graspable and gripping.”

For me Paul Giamatti playing Ben Bernanke is a closer in and of itself. Not to mention William Hurt as Hank Paulson and Billy Crudup as Timothy Geithner.