Mistress America

After the entertaining mixed bag of While We're Young, Noah Baumbach gets back to top form with the utterly charming Mistress America, co-written with and starring Greta Gerwig. She gives a towering, all-the-awards-worthy performance as Brooke, an ambitious, pretentious, blindly outgoing and borderline bipolar free spirit who draws her prospective sister-in-law Tracy (Lola Kirke, also excellent as this lonely and impressionable college student) into her tractor beam of self-delusion. As played by Gerwig, Brooke is a hipster Holly Golightly for the Twitter age with the theatrical bluster of Auntie Mame and the fashion sense of Annie Hall—anyone who doesn't find her absolutely delightful here can go fly a kite. Mistress America combines the millennial narcissism of Frances Ha with the jaundiced observation of Greenberg and pitches it at the breakneck speed of screwball comedy, resulting in a sharp, funny, endlessly quotable movie about female friendship dynamics. Also: Hot Chocolate! D.B.