Shame on you, Roger Ebert. Shame on you, David Edelstein. Shame on all y'all -- A.O. Scott, Peter Travers, Richard Roeper... If I started off in the morning, I could keep at this well into the wee hours, until my palate would be raw and tender with tsk-tsking and the knuckle bone of my index finger would be exposed from doing that chastising finger-swipe gesture at all the film critics who rocketed Starting Out in the Evening to 84 percent "Fresh" on RottenTomatoes.com and 78 percent on Metacritic.com.

Sometimes, and by no means often, a DVD reviewer finds himself in the seat of seclusion, the lone dissenting voice among the critical throng. The reviewer finds himself wondering whether the others saw the same movie that he received on disc through the mail, and if so, what transpired during those theater screenings a year ago to convince such normally astute thinkers to glorify garbage. Was it the mythical phenomenon of mass hallucination? Was it MSG in the popcorn? Was it subliminal peer pressure? Was it just pity for Frank Langella, the sunsetting supporting actor in such brilliant flops as Small Soldiers and Cutthroat Island?

I'm guessing the latter. In Starting Out in the Evening, Langella delivers a universally acclaimed performance as an aging writer slowly but surely descending into obscurity. One day, an adorable red-headed grad student turns up with a proposal: If he grants her a series of interviews for her American Lit master's thesis, she's sure that her work will relaunch his career and earn him a publishing deal in an increasingly pop-marketed industry. Meanwhile, Lili Taylor plays his pushing-forty daughter who desperately wants a baby, but can't seem to convince her husband to let the man-juice flow.

It's a simple premise, sure, and one that, if combined with sparse and nuanced dialogue, would grant these three actors a chance at Oscars (or, at least, "They wuz robbed!" Oscar rejections). But no. No. No. No. Whatever the critics claimed, the last thing I can say about this DVD is that it's worthy of recognition, except to say that I'm in the uncommon position of scouring my thesaurus for synonyms of the words "trite" and "obvious" and "hackneyed" without succumbing to my own criticism. There are plenty of trite films, but this one's unique in its banality. Here's why: If you're writing a film about a supposedly genius literary writer, then you owe it to the audience to write a genius script. The worst thing in cinema is to propose a genius character who would be ashamed if he were forced to watch the movie about him.

The film's dialogue reminds me of every time I've been camped in a cafe and at the next table over there's a pair of teenage girls (or college-age boys) who are so starved for attention that they speak a little too loudly and blatantly to ensure that everyone around them becomes intimately familiar with her their personal lives. It seems as though no character in the movie can deliver a line without using his or her partner's name for emphasis, as if the assumption were that if they went two minutes without reaffirmation the audience would forget them. The same goes for the exposition of each line here: there is no nuance, no subtlety, nothing left unsaid, to the point that even in the final scenes, when Langella's author, Leonard Schiller, hands another character what is obviously a manuscript in a box, the receiver has to say, "Leonard, this is your novel. You've been working on it 10 years!" Please! That's the entire premise of the film. The characters know it, the audience knows it, so why repeat it when a long, intense stare would say everything?

Forty-five minutes in, I was sure that the velocity of my eye-rolling was going to centrifuge my eyeballs right out of their sockets. Novice director Andrew Wagner and novice writer Fred Parnes have crafted (even that may be too strong a verb) a film that feels like the type of script you'd politely golf-clap at a community-college screenwriting workshop: the lines are devoid of uniqueness for the character but overflowing with pointless references to "high art" -- such as to Anton Chekhov and D.H. Lawrence and The Battle of Algiers -- as if literature isn't about dramatic talent and creative style, but prosaic freshman name dropping.

It made me double-back on my critique of Finding Forrester. At least that had a single unforgettable line. In short, I have to ask my fellow critics, "Where're the pans now, dawgs?"

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