Anesthesia: Finally, a Crash for the Upper West Side

AnesthesiaDirected by Tim Blake NelsonOpens January 8
Tim Blake Nelson’s last film as a writer-director, Leaves of Grass, wasn’t entirely successful, but had a loopy ambition in its double-casting of Edward Norton as a professor and his pot-dealing lowlife twin. Nelson’s latest, Anesthesia, has a heavier, draggier approach to both academic and drugs: It begins with a violent crime perpetrated against Walter Zarrow (Sam Waterstron), a philosophy prof at Columbia, then jumps bac