Something went wrong
Try again later.
Private Life
The new film from Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Tamara Jenkins (The Savages, Slums of Beverly Hills), PRIVATE LIFE is the bracingly funny and moving story of Richard (Academy Award-nominee Paul Giamatti) and Rachel (Kathryn Hahn), a couple in the throes of infertility who try to maintain their marriage as they descend deeper and deeper into the insular world of assisted reproduction and domestic adoption. After the emotional and economic upheaval of in vitro fertilization, they're at the end of their middle-aged rope, but when Sadie (breakout newcomer Kayli Carter), a recent college drop out, re-enters their life, things begin to look up.
16 September 1964, Shaker Heights, Ohio, USA
14 February 1981, Yalta, Crimean Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, USSR [now Crimea, Ukraine]
6 March 1977, Ocean Beach, California, USA
6 June 1967, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
October 05, 2018
What an intelligent, emotionally grown-up film. More of this please.October 04, 2018
Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn are funny and heartbreaking in Netflix's best movie yet.October 04, 2018
Even as Jenkins brings out the angst, her inner comic strategist remains hard at work, building sly jokes into the edge of the frame; she has a talent for rendering comedy and tragedy virtually indistinguishable.October 04, 2018
Jenkins manages to find a bleak sort of humor in all of this, but the heartache of the situation is achingly close to the surface.October 04, 2018
It's about love, and pain, and marriage, and friendship, and family. And it's also about enduring, about picking yourself up over and over and over, in the eternal hope that something beautiful is waiting around the corner.October 04, 2018
Jenkins has made a film about marriage and family and personhood, catching Rachel and Richard at a time in their lives where something is missing, and a child just seems like that crucial piece of the puzzle.October 04, 2018
"Private Life" shows considerable skill on the part of Jenkins, who creates the illusion that we're only incidentally watching a movie, that we're really just hanging out with some nice people and seeing how their lives work out.October 04, 2018
"Private Life" earns its laughs, to be sure. But more important, it earns the tears of recognition that fall, gently and warmly, between the yuks.October 04, 2018
The struggle to conceive isn't a new subject, but this comedy drama highlights its fraughtness and absurdity via a perceptive, often hilarious script and two hugely likeable leads in Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn.October 03, 2018
Jenkins allows both of her leads actually to be leads: They share the film and most scenes, and much of its vital power arises from the connection between them.October 04, 2018
In Richard [director Tamara] Jenkins has created a role that fits Mr. Giamatti, who has always been great at comic gloom, like a glove that should have been one size larger.October 04, 2018
You don't have to have had any experience with the difficulties of getting pregnant to enjoy a comedy that is saved from charges of urbane preciousnesses by Giamatti and Hahn.