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Friends with Money
Sony Pictures Classics


5.3

based on 38 reviews
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based on 44 votes
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FILM:

Lovely & Amazing

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 \| Drama \| Romance
WRITTEN BY:	Nicole Holofcener
DIRECTED BY:	Nicole Holofcener
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: August 29, 2006 Theatrical: April 7, 2006
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...

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.

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.

Chicago Tribune Allison Benedikt

Acutely perceptive and slyly quick-witted.

TV Guide Ken Fox

For a film that feels so breezy on the surface, it's a surprisingly complex character study.

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.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Greatly appealing if not especially adventurous, either for its director or for her admirers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

Turns out to be amusing and astute, a smart observation on the ups and downs of female friendships.

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.

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.

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.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Aniston's best on-screen performance since "The Good Girl."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Newsweek David Ansen

Holofcener gets the milieu beguilingly right, but the abrupt ending leaves you wanting more.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

This is a dense and sophisticated work about mortality, materialism, madness, jealousy and pity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Qualifies as a mild success. It's an easy picture to like, even if it's not exactly satisfying.

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.

Film Threat Don R. Lewis

Entertaining and highly watchable but in the end, it just feels trite.

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.

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.

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
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Roy S. gave it a3:
A boring waste of actors' talent and viewers' time. The film is dismal and incoherent.

Nancy W gave it a9:
[***SPOILERS***] I liked the open ended ending best left to the viewer to figure out what they would do next. I had not very high expectations when renting this movie, except I love Keener and McDormand so was happy this wasn't the typical chick flick!

BJ D. gave it a2:
Extremely Boring! The story never came together, it was looking into the lives of four people, but so what? The ending is horrible because it doesn't really end, you are still left wondering about the lives of four people. What a waste of talent, and my time.

Daryl S. gave it an8:
Yep it's not all nicely resolved at the end. I wanted to know more. And I fugre that, if I'm left feeling that way at the end of a movie, then it hasn't been at all bad.

Stephen S. gave it a7:
I feel as if people have marked this down slightly for the wrong kinds of reasons. It may be watched with perfect pleasure just as a large-brained chick-flick, but it is much more if you step inside the director’s space. There is quality in the four female leads–Keener and McDormand rarely disappoint, while I think Aniston is underrated–and their lesser-known male counterparts do well. Direction is sure and the dialogue sharp. Granted, it’s hard to point to any gut-wrenching “money scenes”, but there is in Holofcener’s gentle parable an underlying seriousness and critique. These are good friends, and good intelligent people, but theirs is also a disturbingly planetary myopia not alien to the rest of us First Worlders. They’re not quite like the proverbial frogs in the gradually heating saucepan of water, but there sure is something they’re missing.

Michael L. gave it an8:
Not everyone's cup of tea, no doubt, but I loved it. Excellent, thoroughly drawn characters and witty, 100% realistic dialog. These are people we all know--if we're over 40. I think the detractors from this film are gen X-ers; and I understand why. They haven't dealt with working so hard to achieve their goals...and succeeding. When the goal is reached, a confused emptiness can result. That's what makes this film so haunting. We step into 4 typical lives, and step out 90 minutes later. Like life, there are no answers, no resolutions. A great cast, particularly Frances McDormand and Catherine Keener, make this film highly watchable, and bring their complex characters to life.

Jim G. gave it a6:
More rich white peoples with problems. Finds some truth, but with characters only other rich white peoples could feel for.

Friends with Money Sony Pictures Classics

Friends with Money
Sony Pictures Classics