Sometimes painfully touching and sometimes painfully hilarious, Noah Baumbach’s bittersweet New York comedy revolves around one of that famously neurotic city’s most hopelessly dysfunctional families. Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller and Elizabeth Marvel play the bickering adult offspring of Dustin Hoffman’s seventysomething patriarch, Harold, a selfish, self-important, but largely unsuccessful artist who is now on wife number four, Emma Thompson’s tipsy Maureen. As the eldest son, shambling, unemployed, deadbeat dad Danny, Sandler gives his best performance in years, and his seething rivalry with half-brother Matthew (Stiller), a rich, highly driven, LA accountant, provides the film’s comic spine, climaxing with the weediest punch-up cinema has given us in years.
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) screens as the Laugh Gala at the Embankment Garden Cinema at 5.30pm tonight, and at the Embankment Garden Cinema on Saturday 7th October at 11.30am and at the Ciné Lumiere on Thursday 12th October at 8.45pm. The film will be available on Netflix from Friday 13th October.
