Andrew Wagner’s Starting Out in the Evening is a case of a film having an interesting subject only to weigh it down with solemn seriousness but with a great performance to lift it back up.

With Wagner and Fred Parnes adapting Brian Morton’s 1998 novel, the film presents 70-year-old Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), who has written four novels, all out of print, and lives alone in an Upper West Side apartment. Brown University graduate student Heather Wolfe (Karen Ambrose) intends…

“396?”
“454.”
“No shit.”

“How fast will she go?”
“Depends on who’s around.”

“If I wanted to barter, I could suck you right up my tailpipe.”

“I go fast enough.”
“You never go fast enough.”

“What are you tryin’ to do? Blow my mind?”

“Sure did talk to ya.”
“Sure did see ya.”

“Well, here we are on the road.”
“Yeah, that’s where we are.”

After being disappointed with Warren Oates in Race with the Devil, I had to watch…

Although Eddie Muller showed Don Siegel’s The Big Steal on TCM’s Noir Alley, it’s noir lite, lacking the darkness of typical films noir and having more humor. After a somewhat slow start, however, it becomes fairly entertaining.

Jim Fiske (Patric Knowles) steals an army payroll of $300,000 from Lt. Duke Halliday (Robert Mitchum). Duke chases Fiske to Mexico while Capt. Vincent Blake (William Bendix) chases Duke. Meanwhile, Joan Graham (Jane Greer) is after Fiske because the oily creep has her…

“I’m with a short Welsh man who does impressions.”

I have seen The Trip several times and found it delightful each time. It’s both a funnier and a melancholier counterpart to My Dinner with Andre. I enjoy Brydon and Coogan playing fictionalized versions of themselves. This Steve is desperate to be taken seriously, so Coogan plays him as unfulfilled and a bit tortured. He’s like the real Steve except when he isn’t, though we can’t always be sure when that…