The Time Being is a visual pleasure, with Cicin-Sain unveiling shot after shot of glorious landscapes and striking silhouettes.

Imagine the most overdone, Philip Glass-style horror movie music playing over glossy footage of a university art class, and you have some idea what your eyes and ears are in for while attending The Time Being.

Langella is solid as always, but his haunted, bitter character is pretty two-dimensional, and having to share all his scenes with Bentley doesn’t allow for much interplay.

[Viewers] won’t find much here besides Langella’s typically austere performance, some lazy character sketches...and the sensation one gets after having watched paint dry, painfully slowly, on a canvas.

Despite the movie’s flaws, Cicin-Sain does show considerable confidence for a first-time writer and director.

Not to be glib, but sitting through the art-centric chamber piece The Time Being is truly like watching paint dry.

After all the ponderous heavy breathing, it has nothing more profound to say than “artists should not neglect their families in pursuit of excellence.” Which might not ring so false if Bentley didn’t constantly look on the brink of devouring his family alive.

The pretentious and unrelievedly glum first feature from music-video and advertising director Nenad Cicin-Sain, The Time Being looks sharp, but it’s about as dramatically satisfying as watching paint dry.

The characters are as leached of tone as the film's chiaroscuro sets and grisaille paintings, although Langella is certainly game.

An exhaustingly pretentious heave of artistic self-involvement, The Time Being takes an exceptionally handsome journey to nowhere at all.