Philip Roth, having recently announced his retirement from writing — news that not everyone takes entirely at face value — turns 80 next week. Celebration, and maybe valediction, are certainly the order of the day. Visitors to Newark can take a bus tour past his old high school and pause at the intersection of Summit and Keer Avenues, now designated Philip Roth Plaza, an honor that will have to suffice until the Swedish Academy gets its act together.

New York magazine, meanwhile, convened what amounted to an awkward literary frat party, at which younger writers, almost all of them men, were invited to pay implicit tribute to themselves by professing their great, not always unqualified, admiration for Mr. Roth. The best way to celebrate a writer, of course, is to read his work, but that solitary pursuit, which replicates and requites the writer’s own lonely labor, lacks a sense of occasion. So you might go to the movies instead.

While I wouldn’t recommend seeking out the film adaptations of Mr. Roth’s novels (which, while not all terrible, lack the crucial, inimitable fact of his voice), I can point you in the direction of Film Forum, where William Karel and Livia Manera’s new documentary, “Philip Roth: Unmasked,” is being shown — free, thanks to the beneficence of the Ostrovsky Family Fund — for the next week.

The film is part of the sturdy “American Masters” franchise on PBS (which will broadcast it nationally on March 29), and like most of the other entries in the series, it is respectful, serious, absorbing and exactly 90 minutes long. A handful of creditable writers — the novelists Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Franzen, the critic and journalist Claudia Roth Pierpont — offer their thoughts on Mr. Roth, and some of their observations are insightful. Friends of long standing (Mia Farrow, Martin Garbus and Jane Brown Maas, who has known Mr. Roth since his undergraduate days at Bucknell) speak fondly of him and carefully refrain from betraying any confidences.