Insignificance

Four famous figures of the 1950s converge on a New York hotel room one hot night, with none of them named outright. A scientist in town to give a lecture on his latest work returns to his room and finds a blonde film star there; the two talk about relativity, time, space, sex and politics, and about the weight of fame and the responsibility of those who built the atomic bomb. The encounter grows more complicated when a senator pursuing supposed subversives and the actress's jealous, unhappy husband, a well-known baseball player, burst in. The film is a philosophical comedy drawn from a play by Terry Johnson, who also wrote the screenplay, and was produced by Jeremy Thomas.

Nicolas Roeg directed, the sixth of the thirteen features he made, following Bad Timing and preceding Castaway. The four central roles are taken by Michael Emil as the professor, Theresa Russell as the actress, Tony Curtis as the senator and Gary Busey as the ballplayer, with Will Sampson and Patrick Kilpatrick among a credited cast of twenty-five.

Released in August 1985 by British production companies, the film runs 109 minutes. On IMDb it holds 6.4 out of 10 from about 4,300 votes, and on TMDB it also stands at 6.4, from a much smaller base of 70 votes. A critics' rating of 6.7 from fifteen reviews places it slightly above both audience scores, suggesting a modest, mixed but not dismissive reception.