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Aroview: Writer-director Nicole Holofcener secures her informal reputation as a "female Woody Allen" with this bittersweet New York story that again stars her regular muse, Catherine Keener, ahead of a mostly female ensemble cast.

Keener plays a genteel retro-furniture store owner who develops a nagging conscience about the commercial opportunism of her trade, while she and her husband (Platt) engage professionally and personally with an elderly neighbour and their two neurotic daughters. The premise is nicely structured and thematically rich, though on dramatic terms one might pine for a higher level of consequences for the characters. However, it still holds the breezy, intelligent appeal of the director's other tales set around the modern middle-class woman.

NZ International Film Festival 2010

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