Anyway, it's a terrific story about courage, obsession and friendship, cleverly and economically told, and a bit of a trial for acrophobes.
Goldberg writes short, fresh, exacting sentences, and she is terrific on Eliza's sudden obsession with language, one that flourishes despite the girl's realization that being an ace speller isn't exactly a marketable intellectual ability.
Meryl Streep, as the New Yorker writer Susan Orlean (on whose book the movie both is and is not based) and Chris Cooper, as the Florida flower-poacher who becomes her journalistic obsession, are equally terrific.
The great white whale would have been a terrific touch, given Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's Ahab-like obsession with a new pleasure palace for his beloved Yankees.
It's the latest in a series of rites-of-passage autobiographical shows by the unassuming Hodgson, after 2014's French Exchange, and last year's all-conquering Lance, a terrific and tricksy story about his teenage cycling obsession.
My love of comic books and my weird childhood obsession with Greek mythology depicted heroes who performed terrific feats, and I yearned to do something incredible, too.
A terrific but unheralded book published last year, "Neuromania," worried about our growing obsession with brain imaging.
Paul Michelman: Terrific.
