Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” is, like Lena Dunham’s hit HBO series “Girls,” fixated on the insular, entitled world of artsy, twenty-something Manhattanites, where twenty-seven year-old bachelors are still bankrolled, unapologetically, by their parents, and barely employed comedy writers and sculptors refuse to relocate to cheaper, less happening outer-borough apartments. Like Dunham, Baumbach bravely

Jackie (Bitsie Tulloch; pictured) is porcelain doll-fragile, her gaunt frame as rigid as her pulled-back hair. Her eyes, strewn with mascara, dance with hurt when something gets under her skin which is close to always. When her sister, Caroline (Marguerite Moreau), comes to visit her and her meek boyfriend Ryan (David Giuntoli), Caroline insists on taking them out to dinner, which turns out to be a surprise party. And when the boisterous group returns

Those who prefer their accidental-murderer-with-a-guilty-conscience stories to be brooding and inconclusive will get a kick out of “Whitewash,” the more-or-less one-man dark comedy from Canada, starring Thomas Haden Church, and the small-scale Irish drama “What Richard Did,” both currently showing at the Tribeca Film Festival. Set in remote stretches of wintry Northern Quebec, Emanuel Hoss-

Those expecting a traditional rock documentary on The National, mapping the heralded Brooklyn indie rock band’s trajectory from its shaky origins in 1999 to its gradual breakthrough as rock stars, will be sorely disappointed by “Mistaken for Strangers,” directed by National frontman Matt Berninger’s nine-years-younger brother, Tom Berninger. The film opened the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday night. Not that there isn’t

Eight self-absorbed thirty-something Los Angelenos gather at that yuppie-est of conventions: the Sunday couples brunch, held at the lavish home of the brittle, bickering married pair Emma (Erinn Hayes) and Pete (Blaise Miller). The guests are uptight medic Tracy (Julia Stiles), who’s on her third date with prudish schoolteacher Glen (David Cross); tattooed hedonist Buck (Kevin M. Brennan) and his bird-brained, equally unfettered

Ramona Diaz’s Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey is the story of Arnel Pineda, the Filipino singing prodigy who at age forty was plucked from total obscurity in his native Manila and recruited to join his all-time favorite band Journey. In quick-cut, high-gloss concert video fashion, Diaz takes us through Pineda’s gradual emergence from spastic, shaky newcomer to certified rock god all while maintaining his modest appeal. Fragile and

You never want the word “cute” to be associated with Al Pacino or Christopher Walken to begin with, let alone an action-comedy starring both of them. You certainly don’t want the term “sappy” to apply. Unfortunately, Fisher Stevens’s "Stand Up Guys" is just that: cute and sappy, with too few smart-alecky laughs to spice up its bland soul. Pacino is a faded hitman just sprung from a twenty eight-year jail stint for the accidental killing of a