Judy Berlin, the first feature from writer-director Eric Mendelsohn, arrives on a wave of goodwill from last year’s Sundance festival. This modest, all-the-lonely-people comedy, set on Long Island and shot in pearly black-and-white, has its compensations: a funny-sad performance by Madeline Kahn, her last, as a spurned housewife; the warm, owlish presence of Bob Dishy, playing her husband, an elementary-school principal; and, best of all, Edie Falco’s touching, deliciously nut-brain turn as Judy Berlin, an aspiring actress who works as a settler in a local historic village, milking imaginary cows and shearing imaginary sheep. (Her boredom with the job gives her a look of great gravitas.)
But the film, which takes place largely during a midday solar eclipse, often seems, perhaps intentionally, as tinny and underpopulated as a no-budget fifties sci-fi flick, and many of the little-people vignettes are trite – more cut-rate Chayefsky than Chekhov.