In what may be a perfect sophisto storm, none other than Sir Ben Kingsley plays Philip Roth's academic antihero David Kepesh, a solemn piano underscoring his negotiations with sex, art, and mortality in the Continental Manhattan of Isabel Coixet's new film, Elegy. Kepesh teaches literature at Columbia and, as a low-key celebrity cultural critic -- is there any other kind of intellectual celebrity -- works the NPR/Charlie Rose circuit.

For the second time this year, following The Wackness, Kingsley plays an ethically rudderless man meeting late middle age with a problematic personality forged in the consciousness upheavals of the Sixties (per the vilest commercial ever made: "The generation that swore it would never get old, didn't"). In The Wackness, he threw a tantrum against the dying of the light; it might've been an amusing performance were it not for the implication that there was something heroic about his puling.

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