You Hurt My Feelings

Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Beth

Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings is a midlife-crisis movie. A people-with-money movie. A first-world-problems movie. Prickly and trivial, easy to dislike sight unseen. Smart. A bit French. Talky. New York Jewish. The sort of film where middle-aged people drink wine and chat in restaurants while subtexts dash about beneath the surface. Like her movies Friends with Money or Enough Said or Please Give, then, except this time the knot Holofcener is worrying away at is honesty, and whether it serves a useful function in a loving relationship. Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is an author wrestling with her latest book, which is no good, though that isn’t what her husband Don (Tobias Menzies) is … Read more

Friends with Money

Jennifer Aniston as a French maid

Having struggled to escape the long shadow of Friends, Jennifer Aniston ends up in a film with Friends in the title, playing the singleton with three married couples as chums. Nicole Holofcener’s follow-up to 2001’s Lovely & Amazing walks the same line – it’s a gentle comedy exploring human foibles. Then, families were the subject, here it’s rich people with first world problems, metrosexual tastes and lives obsessively focused on themselves. It is quite a cast – with Jennifer Aniston at its centre, playing the only one of this gang with no wealth and no love life, the only one who has to do shitty jobs for a living, including working as a … Read more