Early candidate for year's most overrated film

Is it too early to declare The Most Overrated Movie of the Year? Possibly, but The Lives of Others will no doubt still be in the top 3 or 5 of that category 10 months from now.

To be clear, I am not saying it’s a terrible movie. It is reasonably well done, and it takes on a fascinating subject (the Stasi secret police in East Germany, and its web of informants, during the last years of Communist rule) with admirable moral insight. But, to this viewer at least, it does so with a bare minimum of imagination and cinematic interest. It’s like an efficient TV movie about the Stasi. And its plot mechanics, based though they may be on “actual events,” are leaden and predictable.

I seem to be the only person in the Western Hemisphere with this dissenting opinion, but there you have it.