Popular reviews

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  Review by Karsten ★★★★½ 9

  Noah Baumbach’s work is like piano music. It takes two points, whether those points be birth and death, love and hate, New York and LA, and examines the in between. It’s comprised of small moments, small notes, each providing a singular mood that, when put together, combines into a larger, more spastic piece. But there’s precision to that. These notes aren’t thrown together at random, one note always goes hand in hand with the next in a melodic way. It’s a series of different notes played from the same piano, each making it obvious through their sound that they come from the same instrument. It’s why when ‘The Meyerowitz Stories’ ends with a piece with strings, you feel the difference. These once singular sounds blend into something grander, something warmer. A newly-found sense of togetherness.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 4

  Gerwig's influence on Baumbach cannot be understated. This has almost every staple of his earlier work (primarily the male existential anxiety and familial fallout) but there's a sharpness to the editing rhythm + compositions and a kindness in the writing, a maturity and generosity that deepens the characters and comedy where the anger and cruelty of his earlier efforts would've undermined them. Performances are uniformly excellent of course but Elizabeth Marvel nearly walks away with this.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★½

  "If he's not a great artist, that means he's just a prick."

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  Review by Evan ★★★★ 12

  Adam Sandler's second best performance just behind Punch-Drunk Love.

  As good as this movie was I was also frustrated at times because of Adam Sandler. Once again the man proved he can actually act. He's freaken GREAT in this movie! Yet he's made so much utter garbage and continues to make utter garbage. WHY!?

  The first 15-20 minutes of this movie with Adam Sandler and his daughter is probably my favorite 15 minutes of film from this whole year.

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★★★ 7

  Okay THIS is where the Sandler comeback (Sandlerssaince?) officially began

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  Review by Brendan Michaels 3

  HIS NAME WAS BYRON
  BUT YOU CALLED HIM MYRON
  THREE TIMES YOU CALLED HIM MYRON
  ‘TIL YOU HEARD THE OTHER GUY, SAY IT WITH A 'B.'

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  Review by James (Schaffrillas) ★★★★½ 7

  I think Noah Baumbach has become my favorite screenwriter; his movies capture the complexity and messiness of relationships so effortlessly, be they friendships, marriages, or in this case, parental bonds (or lack thereof). There's a whole lot of truth in this script and these performances, and the film choked me up on more than one occasion.

  The first half of the film is basically flawless but the second half loses the snappy, nonstop compelling dialogue in favor of slower, less interesting shenanigans and a really awkwardly edited fight scene. Couldn't really decide when to end either, but overall, another excellent entry in Baumbach's amazing repertoire.

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★ 1

  How is it possible that Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler haven’t made a movie together since Happy Gilmore? They are so damn good in this. We should have had two decades of collaborations.

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★ 3

  A noticeable improvement from Adam Sandler’s previous three Netflix originals — in much the same way that a glass of Manischewitz is a noticeable improvement from drinking one of those ominous puddles that forms in the groove of a New York City subway seat — “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)” isn’t the wittiest or most exciting movie that Noah Baumbach has ever made, but it might just be the most humane.

  Too familiar to stand out from Baumbach’s career, but too funny and textured and true to not be one of its highlights, “The Meyerowitz Stories” harkens back to the more savage and sprawling comedies that Baumbach made before he teamed up with Greta Gerwig (whose ebullient influence is…

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  Review by nick wibert ★★★★ 8

  Is Adam Driver in every Noah Baumbach movie ever because I keep waiting to watch a Noah Baumbach movie where Adam Driver does not appear and then Adam Driver just appears every time

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 5

  90

  The Meyerowitz Stories or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Baumbach.

  A relentlessly sad, but hilariously confrontational motion picture. With Baumbach settling down and trading unnecessary wit for harsher stints of complexity, similar trademarks for the director become exponentially rich and moving. It only helps he's working with his finest ensemble yet; Elizabeth Marvel, Dustin Hoffman, and Adam Sandler are all impeccable players, and their shared history is a complicated one, to say the least. If anything, Baumbach's distance, and sympathy, in Meyerowitz suggests the filmography of Woody Allen - finally, a supposed 'copy-cat' can please *everybody*. It moves in literary terms: sectioned title-cards, specific side-stories, cuts right inside the heat of verbal spars, and an…

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★ 14

  57/100

  Give Baumbach credit for self-awareness: He does put the words "Jean's story" in parentheses, acknowledging that she's being marginalized. And I'm not someone who favors a long moratorium on films about white dudes and their petty grievances, or who insists that such films make equal time for other voices. But there's still something maddening about creating a family with three children, focusing almost entirely on the two men, and defining the woman by a monologue about her childhood experience of sexual harassment—an ostensibly harrowing anecdote that ultimately serves to provide the two men with a comic revenge setpiece. (I was no fan of Listen Up Philip, but at least Perry gave Elisabeth Moss' character a legitimate interlude of her…