Frank Langella adds to his string of understated, riveting performances in this gentle, incisive comedy. In rural upstate New York, in a near future in which robot labor is commonplace, cranky Frank (Langella) is vexed when his son buys him a robot programmed to monitor his health and coax him into better habits. An injustice at the local library — a subtheme is the demise of libraries — spurs Frank to enlist his new companion in the theft of an antique Don Quixote. Director Jake Schreier has fun with the pair's series of heists, but also folds in darker notes such as Frank's regrets about having been in prison for robbery when his kids were growing up. Peter Sarsgaard's subtle voice performance gives the faceless humanoid a combination of wisdom and innocence that makes believable Frank's eventual paternal feelings for Robot. There's a twist toward the end that I didn't buy, but even so, Robot & Frank is the best old-man buddy movie I've seen since Up.
