Please Give

Kate and Alex’s furniture business is going great. They buy estate-sale vintage items at bargain prices and then sell them for a scandalous mark-up to fashionable metro-sexuals who just must have a coffee table from the fifties in their living room. Now, they decide to expand their west-Manhattan apartment and purchase the unit next door. There’s just one catch: the new apartment will become theirs only when the tenant, ninety-year-old Andra, checks out. In the meantime, they exchange polite hellos in the hallway with the cranky old woman and her two grown granddaughters. When Kate invites the three ladies for dinner, all the frustrations come to the surface. Nicole Holofcener’s hallmark is her refreshing and unique take on women. In her fourth feature, her characters are, as always, far from perfect. Holofcener’s great talent lies in her ability to take the most banal moments and expose the emotional explosives underneath, the tension between frustration, guilt, and jealousy on the one hand, and resolution, self-acceptance, and acceptance of your loved ones on the other. This, and the precise performances evinced from her actresses, have made her new film a darling of the American critics.