Please Give
Nicole Holofcener's fourth film is about New Yorkers’ greatest obsession: real estate. As in Friends With Money, she shows herself to be a “piercing and amusing observer” of life.
Directed by Nicole Holofcener
(R)
***
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Nicole Holofcener has made “perhaps the ultimate Manhattan movie,” said Kirk Honeycutt in The Hollywood Reporter. The director’s fourth film, Please Give, concerns New Yorkers’ greatest obsession: real estate. Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt play a couple that make a living selling antiques they’ve acquired at estate sales. Business is so good that they’ve bought the apartment next door—but can’t annex it until the nonagenarian tenant dies. Despite the only–in–New York premise, this film goes on to tackle such universal themes as “life, death, love,” and guilt, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. Keener’s character alternates between feeling envious of others who have more and feeling bad about having too much already. In some of the funniest scenes, she “suffers, comically, from a surfeit of empathy,” haplessly attempting to help strangers on the street. No other filmmaker has Holofcener’s “exact sense of the way some of us live today,” said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. With Please Give, the director of Friends With Money again proves a “piercing and amusing observer” of life.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.