Listen Up Philip

Jason Schwartzman, in one of his most accomplished roles since such Wes Anderson collaborations as Rushmore and The Darjeeling Limited, achieves the height of comic verbal violence as the novelist Philip Lewis Friedman who, having received his first taste of literary acclaim, embarks upon the publicity campaign for his soon-to-be-published second novel, Obidant. The attention of his literary hero Ike Zimmerman (played by the first-rate Jonathan Pryce), a major novelist some decades his elder, leads to an open invitation to abscond from Brooklyn and work from Zimmerman’s small-town home upstate. And so the stage is set for all-out warfare between Philip’s seemingly irrepressible ego and the emotionality of his talented photographer girlfriend Ashley who, in a brilliant performance by Elisabeth Moss, exhibits the kind of dynamism that could dull Philip's edge for good. (Eureka Entertainment)