Skip to content

Director · Screenwriter · Actor · 1969

Noah Baumbach

6: briefs
13:00: average
78 min: in total

On film.briefs6

Frances Ha

Noah Baumbach · 2012

Frances Ha (2012) follows Frances, a 27-year-old dancer in New York, as her career stalls and her closest friendship frays. Shot in black-and-white on consumer-grade equipment, it favours observational detail over plot, using Gerwig’s performance and Baumbach’s direction to chart emotional shifts across apartments, cities and roles — from Brooklyn to Sacramento to Paris to Washington Heights. Its themes centre on friendship as infrastructure, class as daily friction, and identity as something folded, not fixed.

Kicking and Screaming

Noah Baumbach · 1995

Noah Baumbach’s 1995 debut follows five college graduates who refuse to leave campus life behind, orbiting one another in the fictional town of Munton. With dry wit and precise dialogue, it renders intellectualised inertia as both comic and poignant—less a story of growth than a study in suspension.

Marriage Story

Noah Baumbach · 2019

Marriage Story follows a New York theatre director and his actress wife as their amicable separation hardens into a bi-coastal custody battle. Written and directed by Noah Baumbach, it stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, with Laura Dern winning an Oscar for her turn as a formidable divorce lawyer. Shot by Robbie Ryan and edited by Jennifer Lame, it avoids melodrama in favour of procedural realism and emotional granularity — tracking how love endures as habit, memory, and quiet gesture long after the legal terms are settled.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson · 2004

Wes Anderson’s 2004 film follows oceanographer Steve Zissou on a quixotic quest for revenge against a mythical shark. Stylised to the point of abstraction, it uses symmetry, deadpan delivery, and invented marine life to explore grief, paternal fantasy, and the erosion of authority. Though box-office unsuccessful and critically divided on release, it has since accrued a devoted following for its unwavering formal discipline and muted emotional resonance.

The Squid and the Whale

Noah Baumbach · 2005

Set in 1986 Brooklyn, The Squid and the Whale follows two brothers navigating their parents’ bitter separation. Bernard, a failing novelist, clings to intellectual superiority; Joan, his wife, emerges as a writer in her own right. Their sons absorb the conflict differently: Walt mimics his father’s arrogance and dishonesty; Frank rebels in smaller, messier ways. Shot on Super 16 with tight, handheld framing, the film sustains a claustrophobic intimacy, using music, silence and overlapping dialogue to convey emotional erosion. Semi-autobiographical and formally rigorous, it offers no redemption—only recognition.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Wes Anderson · 2009

George Clooney voices a fox whose one last heist against three farmers turns into a siege on his whole underground community. Wes Anderson's 2009 stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl keeps the plot but reshapes the tone into something drier and more personal.