Movies - TV
Every Noah Baumbach Movie Ranked Worst To Best
By MARSHALL SHAFFER
12. Margot
"Margot at the Wedding" is an acrid, bleak look at miserable characters throwing highly intellectualized barbs at one another like only Noah Baumbach's characters can. Baumbach's razor-sharp wit is dulled here as the tempo and rhythm of the dialogue feel distinctively disjointed and out of sync.
11. While We're Young
"While We're Young" takes the posture of exploring generational differences but just wants to dump on millennials' lack of authenticity, especially the charlatans doing faux bohemianism. It's a film utterly void of grace, empathy, and compassion for anything other than what it can already comprehend.
10. Mr. Jealousy
When aspiring writer Lester realizes his new girlfriend Ramona previously dated accomplished novelist Dashiell Frank, he's plunged into a self-defeating spiral of psychotic behaviors. Baumbach's urbane script raises some provocative questions, yet it's so quick to hit the next smugly self-satisfied zinger that viewers don't have time to really mull over them.
9. Greenberg
The film follows a nervous New Yorker, Roger Greenberg, as he attempts to just do nothing at his brother's house in Los Angeles, except maybe build a doghouse at most. Caught between Baumbach's default cynicism and his burgeoning optimism, the film falls somewhere in a mushy and unembraceable middle.
8. De Palma
"DePalma" is an engaging look at how director Brian De Palma cut a unique path through Hollywood, navigating the studio system with a sense of purpose, embracing and needling the corporate order in equal measure. Baumbach and co-director Jake Paltrow let De Palma tell his own story, and he proves to be a captivating narrator.