Serpico. Dog Day Afternoon. Prince of the City. In these gritty and distinguished films, director Sidney Lumet held a mirror up to his adopted hometown, New York. In Bye Bye Braverman, he uses a funhouse mirror. The result is hilarious, satiric, wise, giddy - and no less trenchant. Sparked by a blue-ribbon cast, the film follows four Jewish intellectuals jammed into one Volkswagen and squabbling nonstop en route to the funeral of their friend Leslie Braverman. What happens on the way (a fender bender with a Yiddish-spouting African-American cabbie, a stop at the wrong funeral) forms the plot, but the kvetching, joking, fuming and ultimately fearful quartet forms the heart of this smart, sardonic comedy.

BYE BYE BRAVERMAN is a bittersweet adaptation of Wallace Markfield's coldly cynical novel To an Early Grave. Braverman, an idealistic minor author, dies; his four best friends, writers who in one way or another have all sold out, decide to attend his funeral. The foursome includes a disenchanted magazine writer (George Segal), a poet (Jack Warden), a book reviewer (Sorrell Booke), and an embittered bellyacher (Joseph Wiseman). Taking a picaresque journey from Greenwich Village to Brooklyn, the quartet never quite gets to the funeral, but their odyssey unearths many a self-revelation and previously unspoken truth. Like its four leading characters, BYE BYE BRAVERMAN loses its way towards the end, bringing this otherwise insightful comedy/drama to a muddied conclusion.