It is a brilliant screenplay which engulfs the apprehensions a teenager, a middle-aged man and a retired person feels and how all of them are caught in a similar storm. It is complimented by appreciable acting work by Josh Radnor and Elizabeth Olsen and in a small but noticeable role by Zac Efron as Nat the carefree guy.The dialogues in the movie are something you can quote or eventually find on Instagram or Tumblr in a black and white filter. The movie makes you reflect upon your own life and makes you think about how music and books affect you.All in all its a great film which you can watch for a good time and then re-watch for a different positive feeling.

Josh Radnor writes, directs and stars in Liberal Arts. He plays Jesse Fisher a 35 year old introverted but bookish and charming nice guy who is an admissions interviewer at a New York City college.Fisher receives a call from his former college professor (Richard Jenkins) who asks him to attend his retirement party at his university in Ohio. While he is there he meets what seems to be a mature 19 year old student, Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen) and both are attracted to each other, she inspires him to love classical music and opera but is hesitant to develop the relationship further because of their age difference. Zibby represents a hope for the future and vitality of youth that chimes with Fisher.He also meets his former English Romantics professor (Allison Janney) who he found inspirational for his love of poetry and literature as a student and later has a very unromantic one night stand with her only to discover she is jaded and has a heart of stone.Zac Efron pops up offering Fisher Zen like philosophy just when he needs it. Fisher also bumps into a depressed student who also reads the books that Fisher read as a student and Fisher feels compelled to reach out to him.Fisher finally meets a bookstore employee who shares the same love of literature he has and they are about the same age.The film is pleasant like Fisher but lacks backbone. Radnor is channelling Woody Allen, well three women fall for him in this movie but the movie lacks the cutting wit and melancholic bite which Allen could easily slip in his films.The film deals with the nostalgia of looking back which both Radnor and Jenkins do in this film. Even I felt a tingle when Jenkins admitted that he has always felt like a 19 year old, mainly because I had a similar thought earlier in the day before I watched this film.However Radnor is not strong enough an actor to keep up with skilled actors like Janney and Jenkins and his romance with Olsen did not look believable to me. A 19 year old would had ditched him as soon as he had a rant about Twilight type slushy vampire books.Some of the plot strands were unresolved, why did Jenkins change his mind about retiring and wanting three more years which the film never again dealt with.

I could relate to every possible moment in the movie. Great dialogs, great actors. One of those movies you would not mind watching again and again!35 year old guy falls for 19 year old girl, but feels it would be inappropriate to act on it. Cast are fantastic. It's a small movie and not overly eventful, but I really enjoyed it. This is the second of Josh Radnor's films I have seen, I have been really impressed. And also with Elizabeth Olsen as an actress. Worth a watch.Liberal Arts is a resolutely vanilla-flavored concoction but still pleasant, amiable, and a little more thoughtful than your average rom- com.

Liberal Arts is definitely the comedy for anyone who went off to a four-year college and loved the learning, romance and soul-searching that went inside. Most of us moved on to adulthood after graduation, but some do remain trapped, and occasionally they become professors.Josh Radnor plays Jesse, a man whose job is in New York but whose heart is in college in Ohio. At 35, he gets a call from a beloved retiring professor who asks him to speak on his behalf, and the trip time- warps him back to when life seemed more meaningful. When he gets there, he encounters a host of people, usually on a one-on-one basis, who seem to feed into his nostalgia. There is the old professor, who again becomes something of a father figure, the previously hot but older lit professor, who again holds a fascination for him, the fanatical but psychologically unstable lit student, who no doubt reminds him of him but is dangerously on the edge, and, last but not least, the gorgeous and intelligent coed who gives him perhaps another crack at his bungled days of college romance.The movie is interesting because it shows the dangers of what could happen if the sentimentality gets out of hand; college is actually real life, but sometime you don't know it at the time. When Jessie is attracted to Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), he is perhaps projecting himself into a more beloved time. For her part, she is advanced in maturity and looking for someone like Jesse who can speak to that part of her, but she is still too young to understand the complications of what she is getting involved in. It is to the movie's credit that the romance is treated in such a witty and insightful way, and the storytelling is original and first-rate.Actually, the time warp is not always detrimental. Jesse befriends a kindred 19-year-old soul (Dean--John Magaro) and, because of their mutual literacy, becomes literally the only person in the world who understands him. As Dean drifts toward damaging himself, Jesse becomes a potential lifeboat.Interactions like this, between an (almost) grown man and his past are really what make this movie work, and work well. In the end, you realize that happy nostalgia can be just as complex as a traumatic past.