Margot at the Wedding

Nicole Kidman is Margot, a tightly wound author who reunites with her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) for her slapdash wedding to a chronically depressed and eternally unemployed loser (Jack Black) in Noah Baumbach's savagely funny satire. Kidman's Margot is a riveting character: self-involved, reflexively judgmental, dubiously maternal. She's hard to like but endlessly fascinating as she hides her brittle vulnerability by bluntly blurting out every stray critical thought like a reflex. Leigh plays the introspective, stable one for a change, and Baumbach creates a vivid and nuanced sense of family dynamics, at once relaxed and tense, familiar and painfully funny. While Margot's casual cruelty and the scenes of squirmy discomfort are not always easy to take, the bad behavior of this disastrous family reunion is seriously, savagely droll. Includes the interview featurette "A Conversation With Noah Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh."