Review of A Late Quartet (2012) by Nick O — 20 Jun 2013

The only movie ever to be threatened by that inessential Dustin Hoffman-directed work I never saw (remember that thing?), "A Late Quartet" actually isn't the senior-priced late night (after 7 P.

M., that is) affair you'd think it would be. The problems of a classical music group's struggling relationship to one other spark because they, like the movie, refuse to adhere to happy endings, favoring rather the mournful ambiance of personal and professional bruises.

And instead of getting tangled up in prickly pretentious- or laziness Yaron Zilberman's film, what it lacks in ferocity, it makes up for in passion, using characters as instruments rather than devices, and because of it feeling flexibly fine-tuned.

(Get it? Because it's about a string quartet.) Didn't deserve to just come and go the way it did.