Perhaps the oddest duck in the flock that included Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese — i.e., the lucky ducks who got to express very personal visions with studio-level backing back in the ‘70s — sits down and looks back on his career as a director, …

Can we just go ahead and agree that the actress Greta Gerwig is (for better and for worse) our generation's Katherine Hepburn? Adore or despise, she is a force of nature, something to be reckoned with. Here, she makes vaguely misanthropic director Noah Baumbach put down his torturer's tools in …

Noah Baumbach, writer and director of The Squid and the Whale, features Ben Stiller as a kind of middle-aged-crazy Jesse Eisenberg (nose up, shoulders forward), a self-absorbed self-conscious ineffectual intellectual, who, upon his release from a mental hospital, wants to concentrate on “really trying to do nothing for a while,” …

Or, You Can Go Home Again, But Would You Really Want To? The lion, hippo, giraffe, and zebra who escaped the Central Park Zoo and got back to Africa decide that they miss life in the Big City. They wind up joining a broke-down circus in hopes of landing a …

Noah Baumbach's somewhat disappointing follow-up to The Squid and the Whale, though maybe not so disappointing if proper heed had been taken of his slovenly visual style, the inexact camerawork, the mismatched shots, the gray, murky, dingy color. But still somewhat disappointing, in the central characterizations, for the sacrifice of …

Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) is the type who will reflexively engage in conversation with the petitioner outside the Ralph’s supermarket, a nurturing soul who abandoned a potentially successful career in Hollywood to move East and work with her husband Charlie’s (Adam Driver) fledgling theatre company. Her star waned, he became the …

A winning, slightly screwball investigation of the fraught relationship between writer and subject, or maybe artist and muse, or maybe both. The second collaboration between Greta Gerwig (star and co-writer) and Noah Baumbach (director and co-writer) — the first was the cheerfully modern Frances Ha — tells the story of …

Complex relationship film. Parents and children, husband and wife, brother and brother, in the main, but supplementarily wife and lover, male professor and female student, older boy and new girlfriend, among others. The uncommon specificity as to time and place and cultural milieu -- 1986, Brooklyn, the bourgeois intelligentsia -- …

Noah Baumbach is still swinging away at generational divides (The Squid and the Whale) and the plight of the artist (Frances Ha), but here, he trades in his rapier for a foam rubber cudgel. Open on Naomi Watts forgetting the plot of The Three Little Pigs and crying "What the …