"Mom and me versus you and Dad."

When novelist Bernard Berkman and his wife Joan separate, their two sons, Walt and Frank, find themselves caught between their parents' competing affections and bitter resentments. As the family adjusts to life between two households, the boys begin to absorb and reproduce their parents' insecurities, vanities, and grievances.

At once hilarious and devastating, Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale is a semi-autobiographical tale of a family in the midst of a painful divorce. Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, and Owen Kline are thoroughly convincing as a family falling apart, often oblivious to the pain they cause each other in the name of self-preservation. Captured through intimate 16mm handheld cinematography, their interactions take on an immediacy that heightens the film's emotional undercurrents. By the time the titular squid and whale finally appear in the film, the emotional catharsis is palpable.