Dissenters who see this film as a wallow in self-absorption aren't paying attention. Baumbach is acutely attuned to the droll mind games of smart people who only think they're impervious to feeling. Watch how he deals with the children of these damaged adults, children who have to carve out their own space for hope amid emotional devastation. It seems like a throwaway scene when Claude and Pauline's daughter Ingrid (Flora Cross) try to gross each other out. Then Ingrid notes that she once left a piece of her own peeling skin at a movie theater "so it could watch movies all its life." If it's this kind of movie, lucky skin.