Interesting: Armond White likens Nicole Holofcener’s movies to Whit Stillman’s, approvingly:
Although Nicole Holofcener’s specialty has been showing middle-class white women at loose ends (Walking and Talking, Lovely and Amazing), she has become the small-scale wonder of indie movies not for flattery but because her heroines are seen intimately, concisely and without judgment.
I love both of those movies, but I never thought of them as cousins to Metropolitan et al. There’s something to that. Unfortunately, White doesn’t find Holofcener’s latest, Friends with Money, as penetrating, and he goes so far as to saddle it with what counts in some circles as an ultimate put-down:
So far, Holofcener had avoided the sensibility of a New Yorker short story writer. Now, her biggest film yet is hobbled by vaguely snobbish class desires….
That’s too bad, but I’ll still see anything with Catherine Keener in it. All the more so here since Holofcener has a history of casting Keener in spirited unsympathetic roles, which are truly the actress’s forte. At this point, does anyone remember anything else from Being John Malkovich? I mean besides “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.”