a review of 弗兰西丝·哈

1st Annual Criterion Challenge: Week 11: Comedies I became a Greta Gerwig fan kind of in reverse: Although I'd been aware of her as an actor, it wasn't until she started directing with "Lady Bird" and "Little Women" that I really started to key into what she was doing creatively. And now that I'm finally getting around to this movie, I feel like I more fully understand Gerwig's initial appeal as a performer. I'll admit that based on the trailers, I had kind of written this one off as Noah Baumbach trying to do his own latter-day "Annie Hall", which I now see is completely unfair to Gerwig as both the lead and the primary screenwriter. Admittedly, the movie is nothing too weighty, and although this feels very much like other Baumbach movies in terms of being built around the problems of upwardly mobile white folks, Gerwig's performance helps us understand the stakes for her character as separate from the material conditions of her life.