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www.rollingstone.com - : Divorce and its effect on children is a topic movies have worked to death. Writer- director Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming, Mr. Jealousy) discovers it fresh and with fierce insight and feeling in a movie where even the laughs cut to the bone. Baumbach sets the film in Brooklyn's Park Slope, where he lived in the 1980s during and after the breakup of his own parents, former film critic Georgia Brown and novelist Jonathan Baumbach. In the film, Jeff Daniels plays Bernard, the academic dad in career crisis, with the vividly scrappy Laura Linney as Joan, the wife whose writing is just beginning to be recognized. Jesse Eisenberg, so good in Roger Dodger, amazes again as sixteen-year-old Walt, Baumbach's surrogate. And Owen Kline -- son of actors Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates -- is a marvel as Frank, a twelve-year-old for whom jerking off has become a vocation. The boys react in different ways to their overachieving... more...
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rogerebert.suntimes.com - : I don't know what I'm supposed to feel during ''The Squid and the Whale.'' Sympathy, I suppose, for two bright boys whose parents are getting a messy divorce. Both parents are writers and use words as weapons; the boys choose sides and join the war. In theory I observe their errors and sadness and think, there but for the grace of God go I. In practice, I feel envy. more...
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www.wolfentertainmentguide.com - : The dynamics of a family in the throes of a marriage failure are dramatized with warmth, insight and humor in “The Squid and the Whale,” showcased at both the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival and written and directed by Noah Baumbach, who entertains us even while pinpointing the pain the adults and their offspring are enduring. Baumbach makes an old topic look fresh again. more...
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Critic Reviews
