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Friends with Money
Sony Pictures Classics
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FILM:
MPAA RATING: R for language, some sexual content and brief drug use
Starring
Jennifer Aniston,
Frances McDormand,
Joan Cusack,
Catherine Keener,
Greg Germann,
Simon McBurney,
Jason Isaacs,
and
Scott Caan
Friends With Money examines the shifting relationships between four women who have been friends all of their adult lives. Now as they settle into their early middle age, their friendship is increasingly challenged by the ever-growing disparity in their individual degrees of financial comfort. It is a poignant snapshot of the way we live today, where the safe divisions that class and money have created are eroding under the unstoppable force of everyday life and the result is a painfully hilarious examination of modern life that manages to be both brutally honest and ultimately uplifting. (Sony Pictures Classics)
| GENRE(S): |
Comedy
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Drama
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Romance
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| WRITTEN BY: |
Nicole Holofcener
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| DIRECTED BY: |
Nicole Holofcener
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| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: August 29, 2006
Theatrical: April 7, 2006
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| RUNNING TIME: |
88 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
USA |
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
91
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Nathan Rabin
Holofcener possesses a genius for creating exquisitely realized characters who seem to have led full, rich, complicated lives before the film's first scene takes place, and will go on living complex, idiosyncratic existences long after they disappear from the screen. Of course, it doesn't hurt that she has four of the best actresses in Hollywood as the leads, especially Keener.
88
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
Smart, witty and alert to the buried resentments that poke through the shiny surface of affluence, Holofcener's film recognizes that money is the new sex.
88
Chicago Tribune
Allison Benedikt
Acutely perceptive and slyly quick-witted.
88
TV Guide
Ken Fox
For a film that feels so breezy on the surface, it's a surprisingly complex character study.
88
Philadelphia Inquirer
Steven Rea
Holofcener writes with an ear for the rhythms and ridiculousness of real life, and her cast - to a man, and woman - embraces her words with subtlety and certitude. Friends With Money is gimmickless, and great.
80
The New York Times
Manohla Dargis
Greatly appealing if not especially adventurous, either for its director or for her admirers.
80
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
The result is an exquisitely calibrated hypermodern comedy of manners. A quiet but devastating ensemble piece, both acerbic and sweet, "Friends" blends empathy and a great sense of comic timing with the richness of Holofcener's trademark take-no-prisoners observations.
80
The Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
A pitch-perfect ensemble comedy that burrows deep into the mind-set of white, upper middle-class Angelenos, anxious to strike the right balance among career, family, love life and money but never quite pulling it off.
80
The New Republic
Stanley Kauffmann
Holofcener's new film is extraordinary: it engages us from beginning to end without strong narrative, or narratives. It lives through the quality of Holofcener's dialogue and the performances that she has drawn from her actors.
78
Austin Chronicle
Kimberley Jones
The only weak link here is Aniston's character – her Olivia, stuck in a holding pattern, feels like a holdover from Holofcener's previous, single-girl pictures, and Aniston underplays the role to the point of expressionlessness.
75
Miami Herald
Connie Ogle
Turns out to be amusing and astute, a smart observation on the ups and downs of female friendships.
75
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Paula Nechak
While most of the film is well-written and acted, there are some difficulties. Aniston's Olivia is hard to figure.
75
Portland Oregonian
Shawn Levy
It's a movie of charm and insight, well-acted and carefully observed, but it's also one that lacks any real heights to offset the generic competence that characterizes it. There's no real drama to follow, no surprises of sufficient magnitude to enliven the experience.
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Liam Lacey
Holofcener's work is character and dialogue-driven, with a keen sense of prickly female competitiveness and intimacy that a man couldn't, and probably wouldn't, dare portray.
75
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
Aniston's best on-screen performance since "The Good Girl."
75
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris
Holofcener writes as well as Albert Brooks at his best, and her finesse with actors is as assured as James L. Brooks's on his TV and film projects from 20 and 30 years ago.
75
Premiere
Glenn Kenny
With the almost half-decade spaces between Holofcener's three features, one might (rather unreasonably, I admit) expect her to have sought to break wholly new ground in the interim. So she hasn't; nevertheless, Friends is well-crafted, intelligent, genuinely adult fare.
75
Entertainment Weekly
Lisa Schwarzbaum
There is also a manufactured symmetry, an every-gal's-got-issues roundness, an HBO sitcomitude to the movie that undercuts its own observational intelligence.
70
LA Weekly
Ella Taylor
If Friends With Money is about the meaning of success in a town obsessed with wealth, it is also, more universally, about our defining incompleteness, and the sad, uproarious inconclusiveness of life.
70
Variety
Todd McCarthy
Stealing the show is Jane, whose rage-fueled rants and scarcely concealed mutterings are loaded with sarcastic bon mots that are delivered to the hilt by McDormand.
70
Newsweek
David Ansen
Holofcener gets the milieu beguilingly right, but the abrupt ending leaves you wanting more.
70
Salon.com
Andrew O'Hehir
This is a dense and sophisticated work about mortality, materialism, madness, jealousy and pity.
70
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
In her third feature Nicole Holofcener leapfrogs between characters with wit and grace, gathering them in various clusters and adroitly showing how money or the lack thereof really does inflect their lives and interactions.
70
Dallas Observer
Melissa Levine
Smart, patient and ruefully funny... Yet because the film never digs too far into any single person's world, it doesn't build toward much.
63
New York Daily News
Jami Bernard
The four ladies of Friends With Money are people I wouldn't want to ride the bus with (not that some of them would be caught dead on public transportation). They're whiners with little self-knowledge. Perhaps that's what holds them together, but it's not pretty.
63
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
Most crucially, we don't learn what brought the four women together; Olivia's so much younger than the others that there's no reason to think they'd ever have befriended her.
60
Village Voice
J. Hoberman
As its title jokingly implies, this is a more grown-up version of Aniston's long- running TV vehicle--complete with the star herself as eternal ingenue.
60
New York Magazine
David Edelstein
Friends With Money doesn't quite snap into focus. It just floats along-an agreeable comedy of manners with actors you like to hang out with.
60
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
Anger is the rocket fuel of drama. Of the four women in Nicole Holofcener's Friends With Money, only Frances McDormand's Jane is flamingly angry, and she's the most vivid character in the group.
60
Empire
Angie Errigo
While this doesn't add up to much more than 'It's good to be rich and have friends', it's entertaining, with some choice performances and the laugh-out-loud quotient of a good sketch show.
58
Baltimore Sun
Chris Kaltenbach
There's a self-loathing at the center of Friends with Money that makes it a tad unpalatable, as well as a sameness, a dependence on cliche, that makes it seem trite.
50
Washington Post
Teresa Wiltz
Nothing much happens here, and even less is resolved. You could make an argument that that's how life is, unresolved, but as a film, it makes for frustrating viewing, particularly when plot threads with the potential to bust open the story are left hanging.
50
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
Qualifies as a mild success. It's an easy picture to like, even if it's not exactly satisfying.
50
The New Yorker
David Denby
The trouble with Holofcener's scheme is that the center of the movie is dead. Olivia has no drives or hopes or powerful regrets. She has nothing to say, and Aniston does most of her acting with her lower lip.
50
Film Threat
Don R. Lewis
Entertaining and highly watchable but in the end, it just feels trite.
50
USA Today
Claudia Puig
The film is likable, with some funny moments and recognizable human conflicts. But the origin of the women's friendship is not explained, and the nature of Olivia's problems is not examined or taken very seriously, making her seem inexplicably lost and shallow.
50
Christian Science Monitor
Peter Rainer
The cast is terrific, the movie isn't... It all plays like the pilot for a series that wasn't picked up.
50
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
The movie lacks the warmth and edge of the two previous features ("Walking and Talking" and "Lovely and Amazing"). It seems to be more of an idea than a story.
 The average user rating for this movie is 5.3 (out of 10) based on 44 User Votes
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