Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Newly single, 35, and uninspired by his job, Jesse Fisher worries that his best days are behind him. But no matter how much he buries his head in a book, life keeps pulling Jesse back. When his favorite college professor invites him to campus to speak at his retirement dinner, Jesse jumps at the chance.
Liberal Arts is a pleasant but slight romantic drama that leans heavily on familiar indie-film tropes: the disillusioned intellectual, the manic-pixie-adjacent younger woman, nostalgia for college life. Josh Radnor writes and directs with genuine warmth and literary affection, and the cast (particularly Richard Jenkins and Allison Janney) elevates the material. But the cinematography is workmanlike and campus-generic, the plot follows a predictable arc of temptation and self-discovery, and the film offers little that distinguishes it from the wave of similar introspective comedies of its era. The ending resolves sensibly if uneventfully, closing the loop on Jesse's emotional journey without much surprise.