Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story Is A Powerful Piece of Filmmaking

In many ways, it feels like Noah Baumbach has been working his whole career to get to the point where he could make Marriage Story. Throughout his nearly quarter-of-a-century of making movies, fractured families have been a recurring element across a number of his works. The concept of people you're supposed to be closest to having deep-seated problems with one another is one that Baumbach's explored plenty of times beforehand, but never in as insightful of a manner as he has with Marriage Story. Here, the scope is grander, the characters are richer in detail and the emotional moments really hit you in both the gut and the heart. 1995 Noah Baumbach couldn't have made a movie like Marriage Story that so unflinchingly tackles the complexities of going through with a  divorce. Turns out, waiting for him to be ready as a filmmaker was more than worth the wait.

The Meyerowitz Stories Is One Of Noah Baumbach's Strongest Efforts Yet As A Director

The fact that the plural version of the word story is utilized in the title of the new Noah Baumbach movie The Meyerowitz Stories should indicate to the average viewer that this one film contains multiple different tales it plans to tell. All of the assorted plotlines follow the Meyerowitz family, a group of assorted artists at differing stages of life. The member of this family most prominent in the film itself is Danny Meyerowitz (Adam Sandler), a piano player whose going through a divorce and also dealing with his 18-year-old daughter leaving home for college. Meanwhile, his half-brother, wealthy accountant Matthew Meyerowitz (Ben Stiller), is coming up from Los Angeles to sell their dads home.

While We're Young Review

Hip To Be Square

Ben Stiller has built an entire career on playing the casual everyman, the kind of guy who thrives on routine and doesn't want irregularities or anomalies interrupting his existence. There are certainly exceptions in his vast filmography (namely in his character Derek Zoolander and his Anchorman cameo where delivers the immortal line "Buenos noches bitches!"), but that kind of calm yet easily flustered persona has dominated his work in recent years. It's the kind of role he reprises in While We're Young, though this particular feature allows for a bit more depth to be applied to this archetype.

The Squid And The Whale Review (Classic Write-Up)

Family Ties

Divorce is a massively tremendous event in any families life. No matter how old you are, no matter how much you think you're prepared for it, no one is ready for the level of change divorce brings. Noah Baumbach, the director of The Squid And The Whale, uses divorce as a catalyst to upend the life of one family driven by intellectualism, a trait especially salient in the case of the father, Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and the oldest son, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg).