Hoodlum With a sprawling cast of characters and hefty length, Bill Duke's hugely ambitious film takes aim at "The Godfather" but sails well wide of the mark.

Taken together, the sprawling cast gives the reader the sense that the frontier was actually a small world in which everyone sooner or later met everyone else.

It introduced a sprawling cast of complicated characters and made us want to come back and visit this world again.

In contrast to the tight-knit but internally quarrelsome Big Five, the Union Pacific suffered from a sprawling cast of openly warring characters and factions.

"Nowhere" most resembles "American Graffiti" in the way it skips merrily around among its sprawling cast of restless teen-agers.

From the time of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 to World War I, a sprawling cast of characters engage in Pynchonesque high jinks.

There is a sprawling cast of inevitable enemies, or at least tense partners, in the Washington that President Bush inhabits.

Ms. Desai does a clever, dexterous job of orchestrating these events, and in doing so introduces a sprawling cast of characters rendered in bright folk-art colors.

The movie features a sprawling cast, including Danny Huston, who investigates a conspiracy involving land developers and mining companies colluding with politicians to line their pockets.

The consistency of performances by a sprawling cast that includes both well-known and obscure Polish actors is remarkable.