Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig‘s Mistress America (Fox Searchlight, 8.14) is “a delightfully whipsmart, acrid, His Girl Friday-like comedy. Comedy is hard to begin with but making the fast, rat-a-tat-tat kind is, I’m guessing, all the more difficult, especially when you’ve managed to fortify it with serious character shadings and a touch of pathos. And it’s not some remote exercise — it’s tethered to an obsessive Type-A female personality (i.e., Gerwig’s) who feels relatively fresh and certainly unpredictable, and to any number of neurotic obsessions and distractions of the moment, or at least as they’ve manifested over the last two or three years in New York City and all the other hip burghs. I’ve loved almost everything that Gerwig’s done in recent years, each and every time — no exception here.” — filed from Sundance Film Festival on 1.25.15.