It's about time writer/director Noah Baumbach wrote a full-fledged character study, because his attention to the details that make up a personality is peerless. Baumbach's last movie, Margot at the Wedding, relentlessly catalogued the anxieties and quirks of two estranged sisters--but while the depiction of family dynamics was razor sharp, Margot's characters were so generally unpleasant that by the time Jennifer Jason Leigh pooped her pants in the woods, it was hard to care how all that meticulously detailed moping would be resolved. With Greenberg--in which Ben Stiller plays an unstable New York carpenter who's just relocated to LA--Baumbach tempers his lacerating insights with a humor that recalls his excellent 2005 film The Squid and the Whale. by Alison Hallett