The Squid and the Whale: Criterion Collection
January 10, 2017
In writer/director Noah Baumbach’s career there is a demarcation line as represented by The Squid and the Whale (2005). There are the films he did before it that are more conventional romantic comedies that owe a lot of Woody Allen and the ones that...
Frances Ha: Criterion Collection
November 25, 2013
Noah Baumbach started off with Kicking and Screaming (1995), a film, which chronicled his generation of well-off and educated twentysomethings. With Frances Ha (2013) he’s come full circle, dramatizing a new twentysomething generation in a funny and...
8 Movie Collection: Star-Studded Drama
February 6, 2013
With All the Pretty Horses (2000), director Billy Bob Thornton set out to make a Heaven’s Gate (1980) for the new millennium by adapting Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name. However, movie studio executives took the film away from him and recut...
Greenberg
July 9, 2010
When I see Ben Stiller starring in brainless comedies like the Meet the Parents and the Night at the Museum films, it just makes me sad because I know he’s capable of so much more. I understand why he does these films. They are paycheck movies that...
Margot at the Wedding
February 8, 2008
With The Squid and the Whale (2005), filmmaker Noah Baumbach reinvented himself by finally discarding the comparisons to Woody Allen that followed his early films (Kicking & Screaming, Mr. Jealousy) and produced a more nuanced, mature film with acerbic...
Kicking & Screaming
August 25, 2006
The early to mid-1990s was a great time for American independent cinema with the likes of Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, Whit Stillman, Noah Baumbach and many others gaining prominence through film festivals and home video. Like the aforementioned filmmakers,...