Film
Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
- Home
- Box Office
- Listings
- Trailers
- Features
Bookmark this page- Edition:
Love Liza (2002)
Director: Todd Louiso
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Wilson's wife Liza has killed herself. As for Wilson, he's hardly all there himself. If he's not weirding out friends and colleagues with his out-of-whack manner, he's sniffing around petrol pumps and the back end of cars (Liza, it seems, gassed herself in their garage). He's carrying his wife's unopened suicide letter, when he hits the road after his boss propositions him, cruising the Deep South with a remote-controlled model aeroplane for a companion. Philip Seymour Hoffman is tailor-cast as this grievous deadweight, but the film (written by his brother Gordy) coasts on his grizzled charisma. The early snapshot scenes set the stage enticingly, and there's a likeable streak of absurdism throughout, but a feyness and a touch of showboating emerge as it rambles on. It doesn't help that Wilson's highway jaunt detaches the movie for too long from the one character who does threaten to get a handle on him - his solicitous mother-in-law, circumspectly played by Kathy Bates - nor that the reticence about Liza herself seems, if not coy, then a distraction as much as an expression of his state of mind.Author: NB
Cast & crew
Director: Todd Louiso
Producer: Chris Hanley, Fernando Sulichin, Ruth Charny, Jeff Roda
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jack Kehler, Stephen Tobolowsky, Erika Alexander, Kathy Bates, JD Walsh, Jimmy Raskin, Sarah Koskoff full cast
Duration: 90 mins
Most popular on this site
Features
To the letter
Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.
Mind over matter
David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.
Fool's gold
Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.
We are the championed
Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."
A history of violence
Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.
True romantic
James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.
Playing in the dark
MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.
Junk bonds
Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.
What do you think?
Post your review now