The Sunset Limited

The Sunset Limited is a two-hander about a man who stops a stranger from throwing himself in front of a Harlem subway train. The rescuer is a deeply religious ex-convict, the man he saves an atheistic college professor worn down by despair. The two withdraw to the rescuer's apartment, where they spend the rest of the film arguing about God, suffering, and whether life is worth living, each defending his own position and trying to win the other over.

Tommy Lee Jones directed the film, the second of three features he has made, following The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and preceding The Homesman. Cormac McCarthy wrote the screenplay, adapting his own play, and the cast is limited to Jones as White and Samuel L. Jackson as Black, with Barbara A. Hall producing for HBO Films and The Javelina Film Company. The title refers to the train line the professor intended to use.

Made as a television film and released in 2011, it runs ninety-one minutes. On IMDb it holds a 7.3 rating from more than thirty-one thousand votes, while on TMDB it scores 7.2 from a much smaller electorate. A critics' rating of 7.5 from twenty-eight reviews places it close to those audience figures, suggesting a film that satisfied most of the people who sought it out.