White Noise

Above all, it is - not surprisingly - a marriage story, and the story of a family that, in its own bizarre way, might be the most functional and relatable Baumbach has ever portrayed.

It’s another one of 2022’s high profile, star-encrusted projects that struggles to be as good as its dazzling cast and provocative premise.

White Noise is bursting with fun things to watch. And though the story takes place in the 1980s, it tackles present day preoccupations: human-caused disaster, media saturation, drug addiction and consumerism.

The effect here is that [Noah Baumbach's] White Noise comes across far more sentimentally than DeLillo likely ever intended. Yet its forgiving nature is oddly comforting.

Baumbach holds back from giving us anything truly bold. The film needed to be far more experimental and political to have something substantial to say about our viewing practices...

It’s funny and surprisingly unnerving stuff. The film also manages to feel contemporary without ever dropping the throwback aesthetic.

Instead of something that speaks directly to the present, it’s a period piece... There’s not much fun in a film where everyone’s just looking at Twitter. But without its eerie relevance, it’s not quite clear why this film even exists.

At its best, Noah Baumbach’s impressive and thoroughly decent adaptation of White Noise interestingly discusses people’s relatable ownership of secrets yet complete inability to internalize them.

The banter and responses between Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig were so sharp, witty, and brilliant that if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear they were married in real life.

Not only do these numerous subplots fail to cohere into an actual story, but each is approached with such detachment that it feels like you're watching them unfold through several miles of plexiglass via a telescope from the other side of the galaxy.