About Schmidt felt like the kind of film you only see once a year but this is very much a companion piece: another social misfit whose wife dies goes on a fraught road trip and is related to Kathy Bates (excellent in both films).

The tone of black humour is similar, too, but for Jack Nicholson you get Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman always looks much the same - scruffy, shaggy and chubby - but each of his library of hapless losers (Boogie Nights, Happiness, Almost Famous, etc) comes up fresh.

Love Liza, written by Hoffman's brother Gordy, finds him addicted to petrol fumes and - through plot developments - radio-controlled model cars. He's an existential figure, running away from life, and as spontaneous as a child and the film, a directing debut by Todd Louiso, the sensitive record-shop worker in High Fidelity, gives us a series of events rather than a plot with the linking theme of the suicide letter from his wife Hoffman is too scared to open.