While We're Young
A24 | Release Date: March 27, 2015 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
77
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 44 Critic Reviews
Positive:
37
Mixed:
7
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
SalonAndrew O'HehirJan 5, 2016
It’s a lot easier to convey the broad-brush satirical flourishes of While We’re Young than to explain the subtler and sometimes darker threads of meaning that run through it. Read full review
100
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierApr 1, 2015
Noah Baumbach’s sensational satirical drama While We’re Young is, finally, a movie for grownups to run out and see. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranMar 26, 2015
This delicious satire about aging hipsters and their discontents is everything we've come to expect from the best of Noah Baumbach, as well as several things more. Read full review
100
Village VoiceStephanie ZacharekMar 24, 2015
Baumbach has made some fine pictures (Frances Ha) and some deadening, hermetic ones (Margot at the Wedding), but it's While We're Young that really fulfills the promise of his brash but fine-grained debut. Read full review
100
The GuardianCatherine ShoardSep 15, 2014
An almost perfect 90-minute hit of confident and inspired comedic commentary. Read full review
91
The Film StageChristopher SchobertOct 27, 2016
Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young is wise, funny, fiercely intelligent and always involving. It’s not just the director’s most complete film — it’s also his best. Read full review
91
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallApr 9, 2015
What is off limits to steal when everything is available, not only in a digital age but clacking through a projector? Isn't fame always at someone else's expense? Even Baumbach borrows, notably from Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors. Fair, and funny enough. Read full review
91
The PlaylistKevin JagernauthSep 15, 2014
While a truly original comedy, While We're Young is the rare one that also laces rich thematic elements with wonderfully drawn characters to create a picture that's as genuinely hilarious as it is thoughtful about how hopes, ambitions, dreams and ideals of personal and creative accomplishments that ebb and flow across decades. Read full review
90
VarietyPeter DebrugeSep 15, 2014
Though While We’re Young is primarily a comedy — and a very funny one at that, managing to be both blisteringly of-the-moment and classically zany in the same breath — Baumbach has bitten off several serious topics, for which laughter serves as the most agreeable way to engage. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsApr 9, 2015
Only an artist at the midpoint between the maypole and maturity could concoct a comedy as potent as While We’re Young. Read full review
88
Washington PostAnn HornadayApr 4, 2015
Baumbach judiciously calibrates fantasy and realism throughout While We’re Young and winds up sharing impressions about parenthood, friendship, ambition and aging that viewers themselves most likely have harbored, whether they admit it or not. Even at its most confected, this is a film that tells the truth. Read full review
88
New York PostLou LumenickMar 25, 2015
Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young amounts to the most hilarious Woody Allen movie in forever. Read full review
83
Portland OregonianJeff BakerApr 10, 2015
Baumbach loses his grip a little in the third act and gives Stiller too much babbling and ranting. The denouement at a tribute dinner for Leslie is unsatisfying for all concerned but is redeemed by a coda that assures everyone that happiness is possible in this crazy world. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Mar 25, 2015
Laying out its anxieties right there in the title, While We’re Young is Noah Baumbach’s midlife crisis movie, a funny, talky portrait of an aging artist reaching for the vitality he sees in some younger friends. Read full review
83
HitfixDrew McWeenySep 15, 2014
The film is at its best when it simply focuses on this strange dynamic between the two couples and the way they are each looking for something from the other that they don't dare articulate for fear of having to grapple with these weaknesses or flaws in themselves. Read full review
83
IndieWireEric KohnSep 15, 2014
While We're Young is a clear-eyed satire of intergenerational tension that derives much of its comedy from a series of moments in which its mid-forties couple attempt to mesh with a younger crowder. Read full review
80
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzApr 4, 2015
We get a sharp look at getting older, growing up and assuming responsibility. The fedora is optional (and not recommended). Read full review
80
EmpireIan FreerMar 30, 2015
Noah Bamubach’s While We’re Young is the best Woody Allen film of 2015. A fast, funny, smart take on generational jealousy, with Ben Stiller and Adam Driver on great form. Read full review
80
The New York TimesA.O. ScottMar 26, 2015
This film, Mr. Baumbach’s movie, mostly brings a light touch and a forgiving gloss to its own self-consciousness. It is not afraid to be implicated in the confusion — in the self-involvement, the anxiety, the pettiness — it depicts. But there are also areas where it feels soft and compromised, where the subtlety and clarity of Mr. Baumbach’s vision seem to desert him. Read full review
80
Time OutJoshua RothkopfMar 26, 2015
Where he ends up going—a place of real anxiety and envy—speaks to the filmmaker’s nervy ambitions. If this is Baumbach’s commercial breakthrough, he will have made it several steps up that staircase with nothing lost. Read full review
80
The New YorkerAnthony LaneMar 23, 2015
That is what I admire in While We’re Young; it shows a director not so much mooning over the past, with regret for faded powers, as probing his own obsessions and the limits of his style. Read full review
80
CineVueBen NicholsonSep 15, 2014
Baumbach is never likely to make a film that doesn't engage with interesting issue, but on this occasion he's made something smart and relevant that really brings the funny, arguably making this his most widely appealing film to date. Read full review
80
The TelegraphTim RobeySep 15, 2014
Baumbach packs his film with the wit and vigour of a polished one-act play, right down to a climax which wants us to notice how much juggling he’s doing with his ideas. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleWilliam GossApr 8, 2015
While We’re Young struggles to reconcile its protagonists’ rival impulses to either welcome an unexpected source of youthful vitality with open arms or embrace such an individual so as to better displace them from one’s lawn. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaApr 10, 2015
Baumbach, whose films include the searingly funny, autobiographical "The Squid and the Whale" and the brilliantly uncomfortable "Margot at the Wedding," writes wry, sharp, poignant stuff. Read full review
75
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerApr 3, 2015
An extension, temperamentally if not altogether thematically, of such earlier films of his as “The Squid and the Whale,” “Greenberg,” and “Frances Ha.” Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceyApr 2, 2015
While We’re Young is more commercial and less innovative (or whimsically self-indulgent, depending on your tastes) than Baumbach’s last feature film, 2012’s "Frances Ha," though it shares some common ground. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperApr 2, 2015
If While We’re Young hadn’t gone quite so broad at the finish line, it would be a contender for my favorite movie of the still-young year. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTy BurrApr 2, 2015
Baumbach has something of an evil genius for casting. If Driver — the mercurial Adam of “Girls” — and Seyfried are solid as the incoming kids, Charles Grodin (the original “Heartbreak Kid”) ruthlessly represents the boomers refusing to cede the stage. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsApr 2, 2015
As Cornelia's revered documentary filmmaker father, a crusty truth-teller in the Frederick Wiseman mold, Charles Grodin provides a master class in minimalism. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comChristy LemireMar 27, 2015
There are traces of Woody Allen at work here as While We’re Young vividly makes fun of a specific subculture of hyper-articulate New York denizen, as well as the way its characters try to stave off the malaise of aging by clinging to characters who radiate the exotic promise of youth. Read full review
75
USA TodayClaudia PuigMar 26, 2015
Who's more pretentious: hipster Millennials or bourgeois Gen Xers? It's a question While We're Young toys with, if only to provide a context for a sharply observed and witty dark comedy. Read full review
75
Rolling StonePeter TraversMar 26, 2015
Comedy really is hard. So it's a kick when a filmmaker gets it right, as Noah Baumbach does in this stingingly funny take on aging. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinMar 27, 2015
The biggest disappointment is the role that Baumbach wrote for Charles Grodin — his juiciest in many years but with only one or two laugh lines. If nothing else, I wanted Grodin to kick Stiller’s butt across the screen for desecrating the name of "The Heartbreak Kid." Read full review
70
The DissolveKeith PhippsMar 24, 2015
While Driver and Seyfried are both quite good, there’s nothing specific enough about their characters to avoid making the film feel like a blanket condemnation of a whole generation and their new ways of doing things. Read full review
67
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyMar 25, 2015
After a while, the director of the more perceptive "Frances Ha" and "The Squid and the Whale" tips his hand, painting the aging Xers as guardians of integrity and the millennials as opportunists. It’s a cheap shot, and it feels like he’s telling the kids to get off his lawn. It’s not Stiller’s character who’s the curmudgeon, it’s Baumbach. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliApr 10, 2015
Baumbach is 45 (roughly the same age as Josh) so he writes from personal experience. He knows what these characters are feeling which is the reason why the human elements resonate with authenticity - a quality that fades when While We're Young wanders off on the tangent about what constitutes a legitimate documentary. Read full review
60
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottApr 10, 2015
Baumbach, however -- while not entirely past that particular cocktail of curmudgeonly emotions -- demonstrates an ability to laugh at his own apparent age hang-ups. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthySep 15, 2014
[A] mostly engaging but only fitfully inspired serio-comedy. Read full review
50
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezApr 9, 2015
While We’re Young starts off as an empathetic, funny look at middle age and winds up as profound and schematic as a Neil Simon play — or, for the younger set, an episode of "The New Girl." Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleApr 2, 2015
While We’re Young is one step forward and two steps back for writer-director Noah Baumbach, whose movies are never less than intelligent but, at their worst, tend to settle for gestures instead of movements. Read full review
50
ObserverRex ReedMar 24, 2015
A dreary bummer. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineChristopher GrayMar 23, 2015
Noah Baumbach lobs jokes with hectic editing and a Sturgesian velocity, but much of this cross-generational comedy is frantic and wearisomely superficial. Read full review
40
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternMar 26, 2015
Youth may be wasted on the young in this muddled movie. But age is equally wasted on the aging. Read full review
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