There are two distinct experiences offered in The Movies, the latest game from Peter Molyneux's Lionhead Studios. The bulk of The Movies centers around a familiar business-management "tycoon" experience, where you play master and commander of your very own Hollywood movie studio, hiring and firing staff, building facilities, and, of course, producing and releasing movies. You can choose to either let your studio machine determine the content of your films, or you can go hands-on with the game's built-in moviemaking tools, which peg a good balance between accessibility and flexibility. Both parts of The Movies can be engrossing and time-consuming, but they feel more like parallel products rather than an integrated whole.

Now you've got a friend in the movie business--you!

Kicking things off in 1920, The Movies starts you as the chief of a small upstart movie studio, putting the challenge before you to slowly cultivate it into a top-grossing, award-winning cinematic machine staffed with the best and the brightest talent--both onscreen and off--the industry has to offer. Well, as less of a challenge and more of a suggestion, the free-form (or so-called "sandbox") nature of The Movies means you can go about your business however you see fit, without a "wrong" or a "right" way. The game starts out extremely slowly by carefully guiding you through the process of hiring studio staff (like janitors and builders), helping you decide which cinematic hopefuls will be actors and directors (and which ones will be extras or film crew), building your first set, and releasing your first movie. This handholding remains pretty intensive for your first few decades as a movie mogul--and that's a good thing, because there's a lot to digest.

The core moviemaking process itself can be pretty dense. First, you'll need a screenplay, which means you can choose to write your own (more on that later), or you can hire a staff of screenwriters to do the heavy lifting for you. Even with the latter hands-off approach, you'll still have to determine the genre of your film, with the given choices of action, comedy, romance, sci-fi, and horror. Different genres have greater general interest in different eras, so even if the film itself is good, the wrong genre at the wrong time could spell box-office disaster. Once you have your screenplay in hand, it's time for casting. The size of your cast and crew will grow over time as you produce bigger, more-sophisticated movies. But in the end, you're always going to need a director, some actors, a movie crew, and, usually, a handful of extras. Who you choose to fill these roles will ultimately affect your end product. How experienced is your crew? What sort of mood is your talent in? Do the director and the lead actor get along well? Though it can make the process of casting your movies quite maddening, it's actually rather impressive to realize the minute details that can have an impact.

You don't have much control once shooting commences, though that doesn't mean you shouldn't keep a watchful eye over the production. Though most of your employees are basically just automatons doing the job assigned to them, actors and directors are much more complicated, emotional creatures, requiring significant quantities of your attention. Their true characters will often be revealed under the duress of filming, informed by a dozen or so different stats unique to each person. Most of your problems basically come down to stress--and how your talent deals with it. A stressed-out actor or director won't turn in a very good performance, and he or she will often turn to food and drink for comfort. This is tolerable in moderation, but some people have a greater proclivity toward vice than others, which, if left unchecked, can bring a production to a screeching halt. In turn, this can send the cost of your production through the roof as you send the person to your own private in-studio rehab center.

The Movies lets you choose whether you want to be a studio boss, a filmmaker, or both.

There are stress factors aside from production, too, most of which are rooted in your talent's ego. If your talent feels he or she isn't getting paid enough, his or her trailer isn't nice enough, he or she doesn't have a big enough entourage, or he or she's generally unhappy about his or her personal appearance, the talent will get grumpy right quick. Most of these problems are solved pretty simply with pay raises, better trailers, personal assistants, makeovers, plastic surgery, and/or press exposure. There's a lot of information to sift through, and the game usually does a superb job of surfacing what's relevant, though at times the screen can become totally cluttered with pop-up info bubbles. It can be fascinating how your talent grows and changes while living under the spotlight, but over time you'll see the same sorts of behavioral patterns emerging over and over again--which means the constant micromanagement can get exhausting.

Talent will grow old and eventually retire (unless he or she quits or is sold to another studio before hitting the age of 70), which brings us to one of the more peculiar quirks in The Movies. In the beginning, you'll have a surplus of hopefuls looking to join your studio. But this can taper off quickly. Problems start to arise when you expand your studio lot with new sets and various facilities and soon find that you don't have enough builders to maintain the grounds. You'll find yourself pulling people off of jobs--jobs they might already be really good at--just to fulfill a lesser position that is of more immediate urgency. Abstractly, as a mechanic in a strategy game, this isn't inherently bad. It just doesn't feel appropriate--it just ain't Hollywood.