Frances Ha Movie Review

Noah Baumbach came up as a filmmaker during the early 90s indie boom. His Kicking and Screaming is not only a personal little love letter to life after liberal arts college (Baumbach went to Vassar), but a wonderful addition to the stream of interesting indie hits of that era. Since then he’s been sporadic in his artistic success and has occasionally gone wider in scope and employed big names like Jeff Daniels and Ben Stiller in his films. But with Frances Ha he triumphantly returns to the creative fertile grounds of that 1990s indie style.

To Rome with Love Movie Review

Woody Allen continues his new millennium tour of Europe with a jaunt to Rome in his latest comedy, To Rome with Love. Perhaps after churning out a movie a year like clockwork for the last 30 odd years, Woody finally tired of New York City as a setting for contemporary stories of relationships and intellectualism. Though the backdrop has shifted recently from London to Barcelona to Paris and now the Eternal City, the signature wit has remained. It hasn’t always worked well but I’m glad that he put out one more fine film in Midnight in Paris before the inevitable end of Woody. To Rome with Love is a bit of a letdown after last year’s wonderful fantasy.

Damsels in Distress Movie Review

Damsels in Distress is Whit Stillman’s fourth film and his first in 14 years. If his first three films fit together as a sort of trilogy (some characters cross over) of early 1980s Urban Haute Bourgeoisie (a term created by one of his characters in Metropolitan, Stillman’s first film), then this one takes off in a new if slightly familiar direction. For one thing, Damsels in Distress is his first film that focuses almost exclusively on female lead characters (he even gives them the title). More importantly, whereas Stillman’s earlier films were grounded in the real world, his latest has a setting that belongs more in the realm of fantasy.

Greenberg Movie Review

If writer/director Noah Baumbach’s latest feature, Greenberg, feels a bit directionless, that’s probably because the title character, Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), has lost focus after a breakdown and brief stay in a psychiatric ward. Come to think of it, Baumbach sort of specializes in directionless characters beginning with his first film, Kicking and Screaming, about four recent college graduates unwilling to go forth and take their places in the world. Roger Greenberg could be any one of those characters fifteen years later.