The Sunset Limited (2011)

HBO adaptation of the play by Cormac McCarthy (I'm starting to think he's the living writer I'd most like to meet). It is done as a stage play, or rather as those television plays from the so-called 'Golden Age of Television' were staged, here a single set, a room in a tenement house in New York City. The players are Tommy Lee Jones, a suicidal professor, and Samuel L. Jackson, a poor working man and committed Christian. Jackson (I'll use the actors names as the characters have none) has just saved Jones from committing suicide he intended to do by jumping in front the Sunset Limited, a passenger train. Jackson takes Jones back to his more then modest apartment, there they have a philosophical discussion. That's it, its an hour and a half long and it, is, good. Grappling with issues of God and the meaning of life in a very direct manner, two very disparate points of view beautifully and I think truthfully rendered. It's the kind of thing they don't make enough of. A-

See also: God on Trial (2008)