Review: You Hurt My Feelings

You Hurt My Feelings asks what do people want to hear: the truth or a comforting white lie? Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said, The Last Duel), it stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Veep) and Tobias Menzies (The Crown).I first fell in love with Nicole Holofcener with a film called Lovely and Amazing, with a dream cast including Brenda Blethyn and Emily Mortimer and Catherine Keener as her daughters. It was like Woody Allen, relocated to Los Angeles, turned into a woman and without all the neuroses.Holofcener kept doing it again - Friends with Money, Please Give and Enough Said featuring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini in his last role - before she got sick of trying to raise money from people who didn't get it.Holofcener jumped ship and went to television, where they loved her. But she made a semi comeback in movies, writing the last act of the Ridley Scott/Matt Damon movie The last Duel. It was the best part of the movie, needless to say, and while The Last Duel performed disappointingly at the box office, it clearly encouraged her to get back up on that horse.Her new film is called - with typical Holofcener directness - You Hurt My Feelings, once again starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus.This is the Holofcener-verse - people of roughly Nicole's age, living in blue-state America. It's New York this time, but it could just as easily be Los Angeles or any middle-class city.Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth who teaches writing, but who really sees herself as a successful author. Certainly, her first book was pretty successful, though she's having difficulty getting her new novel off the ground.Her husband Don - The Crown's Tobias Menzies - is nothing if not encouraging.The trouble is Beth's troubles are first world ones - as she tells her mother, she didn't suffer enough as a child. Her mother just thinks her agent wasn't working hard enough. Meanwhile Don is running out of great things to say about the book, since he has to read every draft Beth gives him.His own career - he's a therapist - isn't exactly going swimmingly either. His clients are starting to complain that he's not offering quick enough fixes.Is he any good as a therapist, he wonders? Who says he is - apart from his family of course? Perhaps he needs a new line of work. Or cosmetic surgery. Louis-Dreyfus is as brilliantly hilarious as Beth. Her sister Sarah - Michaela Watkins, a younger, happier version of Holofcener's usual muse Catherine Keener - is going through her own career crisis. She's an interior designer with difficult clients. Everyone in this film seems to have difficult clients…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details