Starting Out in the Evening: Critic Reviews

A lovely comedy of death and rebirth.

It has the quiet beauty of a late afternoon, late in the autumn, when New York seems to be not just the center of the world but the crystallization of its finest tendencies.

A simple but unpredictable story of a man facing his mortality, it is simultaneously unsettling and deeply moving.

Among the CGI monsterfests of the holiday film season, this quiet, humorous drama of oppositional wills from different generations coming to terms with each other is one of the miracles of the season.

Starting Out in the Evening is a gentle collection of scenes that work and scenes that don't.

This wise, observant, and exquisitely tacit chamber piece complicates every May-December, academic-novel cliche in the book.

Unusual and absolutely riveting.

It's an intimate drama -- a chamber piece, really -- that deals intelligently with intriguing themes and provocative ideas regarding the ambiguous motives and borrowed-from-life material that fuel the creative process.

This is what great screen acting is about.

Langella is superb, and Starting Out in the Evening is a classy film... but it could have used a little less circumspection, a little more juice.

It honors values that seem obsolete in our trashy popular culture, obsessed with the sex lives of vacuumheads.

While the film shares the novel's stealth appeal ... on the whole it's better: sharper, leaner and less sentimental.

Much of the film's novelty derives from its characters, the sort one almost never finds in 'commercial' films -- both flawed and sympathetic -- and it keeps them vivid, ambiguous, and three-dimensional throughout.

Starting Out in the Evening is a 'small' movie. But in its keenly observed examination of strangers who become intimates -- and of family members who remain, in part, strangers -- it has big things to say.

It's about as quiet as a film can get. But for those in search of for nuance, intelligence and fine acting, this is a must-see.

It's Langella's performance that anchors the film.

Excellent, deeply introspective performances by Frank Langella and the phenomenal Lauren Ambrose inform and enhance Starting Out in the Evening.

Director Andrew Wagner draws topnotch work from a pro cast in Starting Out in the Evening, a wise, carefully observed chamber drama.

It really doesn't get much better than Frank Langella's career-capping per formance.

We're pretty much left waiting in this drifting melodrama about living the artistic life in New York and the ambition it takes to do that.

What to do with this light, while it lasts? [Director] Wagner's problem is to find an answer to that question and also to offer some resolution to the conflicts of honesty and compromise the movie portrays.

Starting Out in the Evening is thrilling in a way that a movie larded with car chases and explosions can seldom be, because of the way it deals with that basic building block of civilization, the creative process.

A strong cast and a literate script make for a refreshingly subtle film.

The picture feels both intimate and immediate, a model for what smart young filmmakers can do with good material.

A gentle, unhurried drama about how people can connect with each other through conversation, nonverbal gestures, and writing.