Mister Tee wrote: why in the world are people so positive on The Hunt? )
The big question, which I also frequently ask myself - anytime, and it happens often especially on this board, I see The Hunt rated higher than The Great Beauty.
It would be easy to say that these people don't understand much about movies. Easy, and tempting - and only a few years ago it would have been my only answer. Now - I don't know, I guess it could be a bit unfair. It has probably to do with the fact that The Hunt is a very reassuring movie - not only, like you say, a movie which we have seen so often before, but, I'd say, a "parable" we have heard so often before (and for millennia) - the (very christian, Jesus-like) parable of the innocent man wrongly accused by a hostile society. In that sense it's so "classical", so - as Heksagon says - formulaic, that it proves familiar to so many viewers - yet at the same time the topic is "hot" and fashionable. Plus, it's undeniably "well-made" - traditionally well-made, but still well-made.
And I guess that sadly we aren't used to a certain kind of movies anymore. Even in Europe, not only in America (and actually I must say that some of the most intelligent things I've read on The Great Beauty have been written by Americans. But then my father years ago went on a conference tour in American universities and then told me that he had heard Fellini discussed by American colleagues much more profoundly - and much more affectionately - than it had happened to him in Italy). It's a general thing, I believe - inventiveness, surrealism, the willingness to go beyond just "telling a story" and even I'd say the much more simple, but rare today, joy of making cinema, of playing with images - things that for decades have been important aspects of movies as an art form - are looked at with suspicion nowadays, and often not understood at all. Too complicated, in a way. It's viewers who have become too lazy, of course.