Micaela Watkins

The award winning Julia Louis-Dreyfus andequally decorated writer and director Nicole Holofcener have teamed up again for another slice of life dramady, You Hurt My Feelings. Nicole Holofcener knows how to put real life on the big screen…intelligently. And she’s funny without dumbing down her characters. Every scene , every interaction is something any one of us could have said and/or done at one time or another. You Hurt My Feelings starts off slow, but grows witty and wise as the hour and a half progresses.

A good piece of storytelling relates to us in multiple ways. You Hurt My Feelings, written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, found its way to me. At first, the nostalgia of movies like You Hurt My Feelings drew me in. Soft giggly indies that revolve around people who are comfortable enough to sweat the small stuff. Funny stories of neuroses and self-examination within the microcosms of families or intimate friend groups. This movie—about an author (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), her therapist husband (Tobias Menzies), their cannabis-selling son (Owen Teague), the author’s interior designer sister (Michaela Watkins), and her actor husband (Arian Moayed)—brought me back to the movies I watched while I was growing up; where the stakes were low but the relationships meant everything (and you could laugh at trouble).

Writer-director Nicole Holofcener has been turning out her own distinct brand of cringe comedy — smart and slyly subversive — long before it became standard streaming fare. From her early films Walking and Talking (1996) and Lovely & Amazing (2001) to her insightful and poignant Please Give (2010) and Enough Said (2013), Holofcener’s films are wry and witty looks at insecure, often narcissistic urbanities. The film is concerned with the very human question of why people do what they do. That it comes wrapped in such genuinely funny, gentle and honest observations is why Nicole Holofcener needs to keep making movies.