Greta Gerwig stars as the titular Frances, a struggling dancer in Brooklyn who, at 27, isn't ready to accept that she's too old to be chasing this particular dream, and even too old to be living hand-to-mouth like the archetypal – and obsolete – New York bohemian she is. Though primarily a character study, Frances Ha is also a breakup… read more!

Ben Stiller stars as Roger Greenberg, a lonely fortysomething from New York who has just flown out to Los Angeles to housesit for his rich brother, who's off with his family on a working vacation in Vietnam. Roger arrives with some serious baggage: back home he suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an institution for a while. That… read more!

At first blush, Marriage Story isn't a film that should work: do we really need another talky melodrama about an upper middle class couple getting divorced and fighting over their child? Starring famous actors? And made for Netflix? Yet the finished project is immensely watchable and even enjoyable, thanks to its blunt take on the divorce industry, writer-director Baumbach's witty… read more!

In The Squid and the Whale, set in 1986, Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney play a pair of selfish writers/professors whose casual attitudes toward raising their two sons (Jesse Eisenberg as Baumbach's arrogant teenaged alter ego and Owen Kline as his lost-soul younger brother) prove to be shockingly ineffectual after they announce their divorce and are incapable of helping their… read more!

I read Don DeLillo's novel White Noise many years ago, and while I liked it all right, I really don't recall anything about it. I feel much the same about Noah Baumbach's adaptation. DeLillo's novel was published in 1985 and was set at that time. Writer/director Baumbach's film is a period piece, likewise set in the 1980s although it could… read more!