Fractured family laid bare

Noah Baumbach's autobiographical film about a fraught, middle-class marriage break-up in the Eighties was nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globes and won both the directing and writing awards at the Sundance Festival in 2005.

It is easy to see why: it's like a more serious version of one of Woody Allen's sophisticated, middle-period movies.

You laugh with it, and sometimes at it, but there's enough underlying truth to wipe the smile off the face of anyone who has suffered a fractured family life.

As Bernard Berkman, the dad, Jeff Daniels is the best he's been in years. He suggests a pretentiously clever man who can't get near anyone, and he displays none of the warmth he seeks from them.

A middle-aged academic and a once-promising novelist, Bernard is still writing without much success. He's a terrible intellectual snob, characterising people as idiots if they are not culturally proficient.

Meanwhile, his marriage to Joan (Laura Linney), a burgeoning writer with a book deal, is on the rocks. Selfish, domineering and mean, Bernard portions out the two children between himself and his wife like a military operation.

His elder son, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), sides with him, the more so when he learns that his mother has conducted a four-year affair with a neighbour and is now attracted to local tennis coach.

The younger, Frank (Owen Kline), sticks by his strained looking mother. The children grapple, sometimes pitifully, with their parents' failure to connect - except in a frustrated anger.

The film is told as much from the children's point of view as from the perspective of their parents.

Walt fancies a nice girl, but can't get it on with her because both are uncertain virgins. Besides, he has a crush on one of his father's pupils, who has an affair with his father instead of him.