Nightly at 7 & 9pm, Sun Mat at 3pm. R 88min. D:Nicole Holofcener. Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand, Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusak.

Following the tradition of smart screenwriting, excellent acting, and careful directing, Nicole Holofcner's third film focuses on four female friends examining their relationships with their partners and themselves - once again creating the kind of fascinating, complex characters, insightful and believable dialogue, and wholly realistic situations, crafting an adult look at life and love in the 21st century.

"Friends With Money"
By Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe

"Friends With Money" is another finely etched, intelligently acted social comedy from Nicole Holofcener, whose first two features were "Walking and Talking" and "Lovely & Amazing." Holofcener has made only two movies in the 10 years since her first, and I wish she worked more. She's one of America's most casually perceptive filmmakers, and her movies are smart and true about the ways people treat one another and

There is a lot of modern American life in her movies, too, from popular culture of the moment to relationship trends, and it gives the films the kind of freshness that, nowadays, you really only find on very good television shows. Holofcener writes as well as Albert Brooks at his best, and her finesse with actors is as assured as James L. Brooks's on his TV and film projects from 20 and 30 years ago.

In fact, the four women in "Friends With Money" could be characters on a sitcom. Holofcener's script uses familiar TV geometry that episodically intertwines the four women's lives in order to dramatize the extremely real reasons people come together and grow apart. Here, status is the lure and the repellent. The film is set in Los Angeles and focuses on three well-off women -- Frances McDormand, Catherine Keener, and Joan Cusack -- their husbands, and their unmarried pothead friend, Olivia, whom Jennifer Aniston plays in the most relaxed movie performance of her life.

Olivia is an occupational drifter. She quit her job as a teacher at a posh prep school (the kids made fun of how rich she wasn't) and now she cleans houses and wanders into the city's department stores for free beauty cream, samples being a nifty motif throughout the film.

Her friends pity her, but gently. In one early scene, the four of them get together for dinner, with their husbands, and the subject of philanthropy comes up. All the couples give money away. (A banquet to fight Lou Gehrig's disease is in the offing.) But Franny and Matt (Cusack and Greg Germann), being the wealthiest of the group, just donated $2 million dollars to a school, and Jane (McDormand), a caustic fashion designer, is shocked. Why not give it to Olivia -- who's mortified by the idea?

This conversation is funny and strange at the same time. These are characters talking explicitly about money in a way people in movies never do. It also establishes very well the tricky tone Holofcener plans to maintain throughout: a fascination with how people behave that never turns into an indictment of their behavior. Accordingly, the film walks a line between discretion and brutal truth.

In "Friends With Money," wealth is a matter of fact not preoccupation, even if, like race or beauty, it's an unreliable shortcut to explain somebody. Are Franny and Matt happy because they have more money than everybody else? Is Olivia less happy because she has none? Success is a smoke screen, too. Christine (Keener) and David (Jason Isaacs) are screenwriting partners who've decided to build another story on their house, without even realizing that their marriage is collapsing and their neighbors hate them.

Another filmmaker might have taken a page from, say, Luis Buñuel's book and given us a scathing bourgeois satire. But the film's accomplishment is that it's not about class as much as it's about character in the context of class, in much the same way that Agnes Jaoui's "The Taste of Others" and "Look at Me" were. The movie isn't full of toothsome yuppie pornography. There aren't a lot of shots of things. The houses are nice, but the folks living in them are the point.

Out of pity, Franny sets up Olivia with her personal trainer (Scott Caan), who accompanies her on cleaning jobs, then asks for a cut. Because she doesn't even know what she's worth, she pays him. The mad, hurt, and confused look on Aniston's face the second time it happens is one for the Blindsided Date Hall of Fame. The film's most intriguing character is Jane's English husband, Aaron (Simon McBurney), a clotheshorse whom everyone thinks is gay. Really, his good taste and sensitivity are just extremely incriminating, according to our cynical, small-minded world.

The characters in "Friends With Money" are so fully developed that they seem to take on lives of their own. If there's a problem with this naturalist approach, it's that many of these people spend the film looking inward. When Christine literally sees her life from a neighbor's window, you realize the movie could use more of that kind of revelation. This didn't seem true about Holofcener's other two movies, which, more than "Friends With Money," seemed plugged into a relatable world bigger than the cities they were set in.

You're also worried about the depth of the bond between the women. When it's clear, for instance, that the increasingly hostile Jane is losing her mind, why does no one call her on it? Maybe it's easier to "fight" to cure ALS than your friends.

And are we really to believe that Aniston is out of shape with that body tone? If marijuana will do that, I might have to cancel my gym membership. Still, my nitpicking is otherwise a testament to Holofcener's uncommon keenness as a writer, director, and lover of people. I complain because I care.

Nightly at 7 & 9pm, Sun Mat at 3pm. R D:Robert Altman. Garrison Keillor, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Lily Tomlin.

Altman and Keillor join forces, with an all-star cast, to create a comic backstage fable about a fictitious radio variety show that has managed to survive in the age of television. On a rainy Saturday night in St. Paul, Minnesota, fans file into the Fitzgerald Theater to see "A Prairie Home Companion," a staple of radio station WLT, not knowing that WLT has been sold to a Texas conglomerate and that tonight's show will be the last.

A Prairie Home Companion
Bury me not

Ebert Rating: ****

BY ROGER EBERT / Jun 9, 2006

What a lovely film this is, so gentle and whimsical, so simple and profound. Robert Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion" is faithful to the spirit of the radio program, a spirit both robust and fragile, and yet achieves something more than simply reproducing a performance of the show. It is nothing less than an elegy, a memorial to memories of times gone by, to dreams that died but left the dreamers dreaming, to appreciating what you've had instead of insisting on more.

This elegiac strain is explained by the premise that we are watching the last performance of the weekly show. After a final singing of "Red River Valley" (the saddest of all songs), the paradise of the Fitzgerald Theater will be torn down so they can put up a parking lot. After 30 years, the show will be no more.

The show is hosted by a man referred to as G.K., and played by Garrison Keillor as a version of himself, which is about right, because he always seems to be a version of himself. Keillor, whose verbal and storytelling genius has spun a whole world out of thin air, always seems a step removed from what he does, as if bemused to find himself doing it. Here his character refuses to get all sentimental about the last program, and has a dialogue with Lola (Lindsay Lohan), a young poet who likes suicide as a subject. It seems to her G.K. should offer up a eulogy; there is sufficient cause, not only because of the death of the program, but because a veteran of the show actually dies during the broadcast.

"I'm of an age when if I started to do eulogies, I'd be doing nothing else," he says.

"You don't want to be remembered?"

"I don't want them to be told to remember me."

So the last show is treated like any other. In the dressing room, incredibly cluttered with bric-a-brac and old photos, we meet Lola's mother and her aunt, Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin). They are the two survivors from a four-sister singing act: "The Carter Family was like us, only famous." Their onstage duets are hilarious, depending on a timing that rises above the brilliant to the transcendent; they were doing this double act on the Academy Award telecast last March.

We also meet Chuck Akers (L.Q. Jones), an old-time C&W singer, and Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly), two cowboy singers who threaten to make the last program endless as they improvise one corny joke after another. We also meet the people who make the show work: The stage manager Molly (Maya Rudolph), and, borrowed from the show itself, the makeup lady (Sue Scott), Al the backstage guy (Tim Russell), the sound effects man (Tom Keith), the bandleader (Rich Dworsky) and the P.H.C. house band. Molly is surely so pregnant she should stay calm, but she is driven to distraction by G.K.'s habit of never planning anything, and moseying up to the microphone at the last conceivable moment.

Adding another level is the materialization in the real world of Guy Noir, Private Eye (Kevin Kline). Listeners of the program will know that Keillor and his stock company perform adventures from the life of Noir, as a salute to old-time radio drama. In Altman's movie, Noir is a real person, a broken-down gumshoe who handles security for the show (he lights his cigarettes with wooden kitchen matches, just like Philip Marlowe in Altman's "The Long Goodbye"). Guy is visited by a character described as the Dangerous Woman (Virginia Madsen), who may perhaps be an angelic one.

The final visitor to the Fitzgerald theater is Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones ), who represents the investors who have bought the lovely theater and will tear it down. He doesn't recognize the bust of a man in the theater's private box, but we do: It is F. Scott Fitzgerald, that native son of St. Paul in whose honor the theater is named. A little later, Ed Lachman's camera helps Altman observe that Fitzgerald and Guy Noir have profiles so similar as to make no difference.

Like the show that inspired it, "A Prairie Home Companion" is not about anything in particular. Perhaps it is about everything in general: About remembering, and treasuring the past, and loving performers not because they are new but because they have lasted. About smiling and being amused, but not laughing out loud, because in Minnesota loud laughter is seen as a vice practiced on the coasts. About how all things pass away, but if you live your life well, everything was fun while it lasted. There is so much of the ghost of Scott Fitzgerald hovering in the shadows of this movie that at the end I quoted to myself the closing words of The Great Gatsby. I'm sure you remember them, so let's say them together: And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.