WEDDING CRASHER

Margot at the Wedding is writer-director Noah Baumbach's follow-up to his remarkable The Squid and the Whale of two years ago. Less fully baked than the first film but just as beautifully acted, the new one works some of the same thematic territory: selfabsorbed adults of a literary bent fucking up their kids in a droll, funny-sad way that makes such spectacle bearable to watch. The new film also redeems a widely and deservedly despised genre: the estranged-family-members-jammed-together-ina-house-for-a-funeral/wedding/Christmasfilm. Unsuccessfully repressing the usual decades of resentment are Margot (Nicole Kidman), a lousy mother as well as a successful short-story writer (there are a handful of these in real life, believe it or not), and her more free-spirited sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Pauline, a better mother, is about to marry Malcolm, who, since he's played by Jack Black as a variation on previous Jack Black characters, may well be an unsuitable match. Margot certainly thinks so and, gifted with a borderline personality disorder, says as much. She's a monster, but a conflicted, human, sometimes charming one—just like people you probably know, alas. It's a great role, too, and Kidman, after a fiveyear dead zone of cruddy commercial vehicles and off-the-rails art films, here reminds us that she's one of her generation's best actresses and not just a former Academy Award winner with dicey management.

BRUCE HANDY