Date: March 11
Location: Clifton Living Room

It’s impossible to watch this film and not compare it to Before Sunset. As in Sunset, Julie Delpy (who wrote, directed, edited and even scored this film) plays a romantically-confused French woman wandering through Paris conversing with her snarky American boyfriend. Her parents even return, playing her parents, just as they did in Sunset.

The problem is, just about any film suffers in comparison to Richard Linklater’s classic, so a film that so brazenly mimics it really doesn’t stand a chance. Delpy and Adam Goldberg do their best with the often-clever script, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was with the wrong guy. I had no investment in the romance, and the neuroses grew old rather quickly. The plot was also contrived — Delpy’s character keeps running into old boyfriends — in a way the Linklater film (and its “prequel” Before Sunrise) never did.

I like both of these actors quite a bit and would love to see them (together or separately) in a film that isn’t a blatant copy of one of my all-time favorites.

Date: March 4
Location: Clifton Living Room

I’m glad movies like this are being made, and I’m glad writer/director Noah Baumbach is interested in making them. I’m just not so sure I want to watch them. It’s talky, raw, darkly funny and (to borrow a phrase I heard from an elderly woman following The English Patient) “very European.”

Nicole Kidman does wonderful work as the deeply flawed title character, a woman who shows affection by mistreating her loved ones. She and Jennifer Jason Leigh, playing her sister, have great chemistry and their scenes feel painfully real. Also memorable is newcomer Zane Pais, playing Kidman’s son, and shining in some achingly uncomfortable scenes. It’s all very well done, but how much fun is it to watch unlikeable people attack each other for 90 minutes? Some, but not a lot.