Frances Ha

Directed by Noah Baumbach

(R)

***

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“Frances Ha marks the rare instance in which an actress has the perfect role at the perfect time,” said John Anderson in The Wall Street Journal. In a “glorious” black-and-white film that sometimes feels like a contemporary answer to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Greta Gerwig so effortlessly plays a 27-year-old New Yorker who’s stumbling through early adulthood that you might just decide she’s “the greatest actress alive.” But Gerwig and her co-screenwriter, director Noah Baumbach, have created a story that too often “rings the doorbell of profundity but then runs away,” said Kyle Smith in the New York Post. There are “100 finely lathed one-liners” in this “effervescent” picture, but it studiously avoids developing any of its themes, or even its storylines. Yet as Frances loses a roommate, splits with a boyfriend, and bounces from apartment to apartment, Gerwig’s magnetism keeps us rooting for her, said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Her “dead-on portrait” of this charming, self-sabotaging woman “more than makes you feel hopeful about movies, it allows you to feel that way about life as well.”