Mistress America is Noah Baumbach’s second feature for 2015, and by far the strongest. His first effort, While We’re Young, parlayed an unconvincing generational-gap comedy into a weirdly-shoehorned meditation on authenticity in documentaries; Mistress America, thankfully, proves to be both a funnier comedy and a more insightful analysis of the blurred line between artificiality and…
Amanda Adolfsson’s Young Sophie Bell is an intimate insight into female friendship; passionate and personal, combative and competitive all at once. Sophie (Felice Jankell) – whose surname is actually Karlsson – has been best friends with Alice (Hedda Stiernstedt) since infancy. They shine together, as exemplified by the opening scene, where their vibrant pink and…
Towards the end of Noah Baumbach’s latest film, While We’re Young, protagonist Josh (Ben Stiller) laments the feeling of being a “child imitating an adult.” It’s a familiar, facile observation. It’s the kind of thing that people say when their life is absent real concerns – about money, illness or the like – and they’re…
Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha is a curious blend of universality and specificity. It tells the tale of young Frances Halliday (Greta Gerwig), an aspiring dancer, as she bounces from apartment to apartment in New York City. We follow her successes and her failures, and watch her orbit through and around various friendship groups, moving away…
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