Please Give

Directed by Nicole Holofcener

(R)

***

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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.