Movie Review
'Private Life' is intelligent bourgeois comedy at it's best
Discerning cinema lovers are sure to appreciate this tale of a couple's desperate journey to conceive a child in the age of assisted reproduction
It's a sad indictment of the current state of American cinema that it's been 11 years since director Tamara Jenkins's last film, The Savages. That film gave us a small, beautifully acted and morbidly humorous story of two dysfunctional siblings who come together in the wake of the death of a parent - producing memorable performances from Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
However, while much of the feature content produced by Netflix has tended to cater for the arbitrary needs of the streaming service's mysterious algorithms, giving us a host of Kevin Hart specials, misjudged Adam Sandler trash and uneven post-apocalyptic alien survivalist action films, it has begun to up its game as far as discerning cinema lovers are concerned.
We've had Nicole Holofcener's moving family comedy The Land of Steady Habits, Paul Greengrass's 22 July, a suitably claustrophobic retelling of Anders Breivik's attacks in Norway, and now a welcome return to the screen for Jenkins with her latest film Private Life...
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