From his son's point of view, Edward Bloom's timing is off. He spent the years before his son's birth having amazing adventures and meeting unforgettable characters, and the years after the birth, telling his stories to his son, over and over and over again.

Albert Finney plays a tireless blowhard and, in "Big Fish," his character repeats the same stories so relentlessly you expect to see the squawking crow come flying across the screen like in Taiwanese children's animation. Some, however, find old Edward heroic and charming, and his wife is one of them. Sandra (Jessica Lange) stands watch in the upper bedroom where her husband is leaving life as boisterous as he lived it. She summons home their son, Will (Billy Crudup).

Will, a journalist working in Paris, knows his father's stories by heart and has one final exasperated request: Could his father now finally tell him the truth?
Tim Burton directed the movie, and we sense his eagerness to plunge into the flashbacks, which show Young Edward (Ewan McGregor) and Young Sandra (Alison Lohman) actually having some of the adventures the old man tirelessly recounts. Those memories involve a witch (Helena Bonham-Carter) whose glass eye reflects the way her visitors will die, and a circus run by Amos Calloway (Danny DeVito), where he makes friends with characters such as Karl the Giant (Matthew McGrory).

As you would expect from Burton, "Big Fish" is a great-looking film, with a fantastic visual style, but there is no denying that Will has a point: The old man is a blowhard. There is a point at which his stories stop working as entertainment and digress into torture--as does the movie.