While We're Young Movie Review

Whatever stage in life he’s at, Noah Baumbach has not stopped writing characters who fret about their own lives, where they’ve been, and where they’re headed. I get the feeling he’s a man who is always in tune with some level of dissatisfaction with his life. One shouldn’t confuse that with unhappiness. I think it’s probably natural to wonder about what you’ve done, the choices you’ve made, and whether you could be doing something better or more important. What separates Baumbach from most other people is that he’s attuned to those feelings probably in everyone around him. That’s why he’s so good at writing dialogue and characters that so precisely and concisely sum up complex emotions.

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.

Kicking and Screaming Movie Review

Watching all those Whit Stillman movies a couple of months ago got me thinking again about Kicking and Screaming, a movie about four friends recently graduated from college, which I hadn’t seen since I was their age. It was Noah Baumbach’s first feature film (he shares a story credit with Oliver Berkman), made on a fairly low budget in the mid-90s when low budgets were sheik, and features the actor Chris Eigeman, whose presence is part of what connects the movie in my mind to Stillman’s work. That and similar writing styles that focus on educated characters who speak literately and engagingly on a variety of topics.