Critics reviews

What saves Starting out in the Evening is the beautiful conceit... that the movie we are watching is the very novel he ended up finishing... It's a shot that repeats the opening shot of the film, in which we also see Leonard at the typewriter, and what we come to realise is that the whole film is, as it were, this second draft. That what we have been looking is all of Leonard's characters, including Leonard himself, slowly coming to life after being set free.

Much of the film's novelty derives from its characters, the sort one almost never finds in "commercial" films — both flawed and sympathetic — and it keeps them vivid, ambiguous, and three-dimensional throughout.