MOVIES . . . KICKING AND SCREAMING

An upmarket "Clerks," a less fraught "Jeffery," "Barcelona" with a faster pulse or maybe "Friends" on PBS, "Kicking and Screaming" is a postmodern comedy of manners in which hyperarticulate twentysomethings talk about the imminent threat of becoming thirtysomethings. Writer-director Noah Baumbach's characters wear cool like a dinner jacket, says TIME's Richard Corliss; their offhand wit is so studied that their bull sessions seem like a final they crammed for. "But Baumbach is canny enough to salt the stew with poignance, so that by the end these attitude machines have become human beings, more than the sum of their chiseled jokes. Baumbach is a find, of sorts: he has both comic sense and camera sense. Imagine Quentin Tarantino without the guns."