Noah Baumbach
It’s hard to imagine Noah Baumbach making a film about an apocalypse, yet this enigma-raveled concept perfectly encapsulates White Noise.
Marriage Story is a promising film, but Baumbach’s strategies in drawing out his character arcs are uneven, insufficient, and disappointing.
In his final report from Film Fest 919, Josh Martin takes a look at four very different films: Collisions, Cyrano My Love, Marriage Story and In Fabric.
Noah Baumbach’s incisive and compassionate look at a marriage breaking up and a family staying together.
Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha perfectly represents the complexities of your 20s. Read why the film is such an accurate portrait.
Marriage Story is amongst Noah Baumbach’s finest works; it is sympathetic and charming, while containing some career-best performances by Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver.
Marriage Story is a heavy-hitting and brutal feature that leaves no stone unturned and no fallen tear allowed to escape from the camera.
The Meyerowitz Stories may be a typical satire for Noah Baumbach, but the character of Danny, warmly played by Adam Sandler, helps to raise it.
It now appears to be a given that every few years, Woody Allen produces a film hailed by critics as a “return to form”. In keeping with relatively recent late period offerings such as Blue Jasmine, Midnight in Paris and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Café Society has also been afforded that accolade. Is this lazy journalism or a concise way of communicating that he has again crafted a film that bears the hallmarks of this aging auteur’s better judgement?
Director Noah Baumbach has become synonymous with “hipster cinema”- which in his case, means character studies of self-obsessed, over-privileged big city dwellers, who he tends to love, even if audience members are more likely to find their company unwelcoming. Yet he is a far more complicated director than that; weirdly, in his most recent movies, he’s been rationing out the abrasive commentary of the hipster community (the raging members of Generation X and the fresh-faced millennials) with something approaching empathetic humanism. His previous film, While We’re Young, was the most empathetic portrayal of hipster culture we are ever likely to see in modern cinema – something even the sharp left turn into trademark Baumbach cynicism in the film’s third act couldn’t overwrite.
No matter how good their circumstances are, many young people wish they were born in a different time, in a different place, belonging to a different generation they believe they fit in with more. This is almost definitely due to the influence of pop-culture; the 80’s weren’t exactly the best time to live in, yet show a John Hughes movie to any impressionable teenager and they will almost definitely long to have lived in that time period. While We’re Young, the best film to date from director Noah Baumbach, takes a unique look at this theme in the space of one of the best movie montages in recent memory – whereas the young, hipster types long to live in an area of vinyls, VHS tapes and typewriters, the ageing are trying to stay relevant to today, filling their lives with useless technology in order to stay relevant in an ever changing society.
