The Squid and the Whale: Critic Reviews

Baumbach lets no one off the hook, least of all himself.

Mining his own chidlhood, Noah Baumbach has put together an unsparing, funny portrait of a family in crisis and a young man trying to figure out his parents and himself.

An incisive and intimate tale of a Brooklyn family falling apart as told by the two sons.

The movie feels like it was written in the filmmaker's own sweat and tears.

The movie's lasting sting belies its brief 80 minutes. This is one cinematic novella that stays with you for quite a while.

Tender, cruel, and very funny, Baumbach's fourth feature turns family history into a sort of urban myth.

[A] wrenchingly funny, agonizingly astute movie.

Brevity is, indeed, the soul of wit, and in this case, wit barely starts to describe the value of this dead-on, full-of-life motion picture.

There's nothing fun about divorce, but The Squid and the Whale manages to wring humor from a sharp-edged, painfully real separation story that goes straight for the jugular on its way to the funny bone.

The most praiseworthy thing about emerging writer-director Noah Baumbach's movie is the precise observation and delivery of language.

It's a small miracle.

The Squid and the Whale is essentially about how we grow up by absorbing what is useful in our parents and forgiving what is not.

As one who survived the epic clash of estranged parents, Baumbach has not only lived to tell the tale but has grown up with sufficient empathy to retell it with great flourish, and from the perspectives of the warriors and their collateral damage.

Daniels and Linney do a great job of being despicable without coming off as monstrous, which is what makes the characters credible.

It's a movie filled with pain and frustration, but it's also consistently funny, riding the fine line between tragic understanding and comic observation.

Don't look now, but Jeff Daniels' days as 'the other Jeff' may be coming to an end.

Works very well as a grown-up family entertainment unafraid of all the indelicate details of pubescent indiscretions among children entangled in a supposedly 'friendly' divorce.

Makes up in strong performances and wry observation what it sometimes lacks in narrative drive.

The Squid and the Whale gazes inward, like a diary, and with its washed-out look it's bitterly sober.

A brutal study in distracted parenting.

Both literarily wise and literary in itself, The Squid and the Whale is a fresh rendering of the agony of divorce.

This is a film that reinvigorates the divorce cliche through the steady application of two ingredients: scrupulous honesty and admirable concision.

Has so much going for it -- including intelligent performances that mesh beautifully, and a keen understanding of how seemingly small moments can rattle the foundations of families -- that you walk away from it feeling it should add up to more.

You can look at The Squid and the Whale as the truest kind of artistic coming-of-age story: a cathartic piece of self-criticism.