Frances Ha (2013)
Average Rating: 7.8/10
Reviews Counted: 136
Fresh: 126 | Rotten: 10
Audiences will need to tolerate a certain amount of narrative drift, but thanks to sensitive direction from Noah Baumbach and an endearing performance from Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha makes it easy to forgive.
Average Rating: 7.9/10
Critic Reviews: 36
Fresh: 32 | Rotten: 4
Audiences will need to tolerate a certain amount of narrative drift, but thanks to sensitive direction from Noah Baumbach and an endearing performance from Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha makes it easy to forgive.
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Average Rating: 3.8/5
User Ratings: 9,321
Movie Info
Frances (Greta Gerwig) lives in New York, but she doesn't really have an apartment. Frances is an apprentice for a dance company, but shes not really a dancer. Frances has a best friend named Sophie, but they aren't really speaking anymore. Frances throws herself headlong into her dreams, even as their possible reality dwindles. Frances wants so much more than she has but lives her life with unaccountable joy and lightness. FRANCES HA is a modern comic fable that explores New York, friendship,
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Frances Ha Trailer & Photos
All Critics (136) | Top Critics (36) | Fresh (126) | Rotten (10)
In your twenties you decide on the final version of you. Sophie is working on it; Frances is stuck in her crazy, clueless, can't-pay-the-rent stage.
Top CriticIt's a tribute to Gerwig's performance, somehow both clumsy and elegant, that she wins us over despite ourselves, that we come to appreciate her aimlessness in a goal-oriented society ...
This is an odd film (creepier than it knows), and even if you feel the atmospheric company of Dunham-ism, with a little of Whit Stillman, Henry Jaglom, and Woody Allen, the core influence on Noah Baumbach's film is fifty years older or more.
Baumbach usually builds his films around difficult protagonists, but Frances is entirely endearing, at once silly and deep, hopeless and promising.
The dialogue and editing are zippy and generally charming, combining with the tart observations of 20-something culture to create a nice frisson.
A black-and-white salute to the French New Wave (the score is borrowed from Georges Delerue, composer of many a Truffaut and Godard film) that manages to be very much of this moment ...
[T]he film is a delightfully spry vacation into the life of a woman who doesn't really deserve the affectionate film around her.
It's all wonderfully tangential, sweet and unerringly funny, and it will have you dancing to Bowie's 'Modern Love' for days and days.
Its flighty quarter-life crisis theme [will be] familiar to anyone who's seen five minutes of Girls.
A genuinely heartfelt, gorgeous and beautiful celebration of youth, friendship and grappling with all the contradictions and challenges that life throws at us.
The likes of In Search Of A Midnight Kiss and Annie Hall have told their stories with much more wit and charm.
a smart, wry and surprisingly tender film about standing at the crossroads of adulthood.
A virtuoso piece of writing, acting and direction to bring to the screen a 27 year old New Yorker who is more a dreamer than a pragmatist, more a romantic than a materialist and less able to control her life than to guess it
The film is like a breath of fresh air, with each gulp taken at the forks in the road that Frances encounters. It's fluid and free with as much spontaneity as a bird taking flight
Frances Ha has a warmth and lightness absent from Baumbach's earlier films, The Squid And The Whale (2005) and Margot At The Wedding (2007).
The sheer joy on Gerwig's face as she leaps and pirouettes across roads and between pedestrians is infectious.
There's little doubt that many people will find her insufferable, and almost everyone will experience moments of acute discomfort. But this is a wonderful performance that never becomes ingratiating.
Like Ethan Hawke's recent Before Midnight (aimed at people in their 40s), Frances Ha will engage its literate-minded target audience fed up with disaster blockbusters.
The hilarious, touching Frances Ha is lubricated by the same juice that allowed Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part to slip so smoothly through the streets of Paris.
A film that's well aware of its own hipness, but never too cool to laugh and cry.
Frances Ha might well strike some viewers as ridiculously twee and tiresomely indulgent to its immature heroine. Not me, though. I'm happy to be enchanted.
Gerwig's last jaunt to Europe was in Woody Allen's feeble and disjointed To Rome With Love, and even Allen himself might acknowledge that here she is despatched across the Atlantic in a far more successful cause.
A perky cinematic pick-me-up starring the endearing Greta Gerwig who co-wrote the screenplay with director Noah Baumbach, her boyfriend.
I'm not sure what Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha is about, which is one reason I like it so much.
Frances is only adequate as a dancer but her enthusiasm bridges the gap between aspiration and ability. She deserves an A for effort. The film gets one for attainment.
It's a likable movie, with some nice moments of both comedy and pathos, and beautifully shot, but for me the reverence for its heroine was not completely earned, and the arrowhead was missing: the decisive jab of satire, of insight, of love.
Audience Reviews for Frances Ha
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Discussion Forum
| Topic | Last Post | Replies |
|---|---|---|
| Just thought I'd start a thread. | 4 months ago | 4 |
| And the Oscar nominee for Best Actress is... | 2 months ago | 2 |
| Gerwig's performance | 3 months ago | 1 |
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