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In 2005, writer-director Noah Baumbach created a minor masterpiece with , a caustic but humane comedy inspired by his parents' messy divorce. Follow-up Margot At The Wedding, starring Nicole Kidman, is another story of dysfunctional family and intellectual characters with zero emotional tact, but it ratchets up the levels of familial spite to unbearable levels. Squid had charming people saying unforgivable things, but Margot oozes poison from start to finish, challenging you to give a damn.

The wedding of the title is between the new-age, old money Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her oafish boyfriend Malcolm (Jack Black). The eponymous Margot (Kidman) is Pauline's estranged sister, a surprise arrival who's actually on the run from her own disintegrating marriage to a fellow author back in New York. The sisters' first evening together quickly shows they're people who consider themselves too bright and too educated to be ruled by elemental feelings. Nothing is out of bounds, no ghastly memory or family disgrace can pull them down from their lofty intellectual perch. They laugh hysterically when they remember their other sister - absent- was raped as a child.

"EASIER TO APPRECIATE THAN ENJOY"

As he showed with Squid, Baumbach's talent is for taking stuck-up characters and dragging them down to earth. Scenes of vicious, passive-aggressive arguments and the most basic physical indignities and humiliations show Margot and Pauline are not the Nietzschean superwomen they think are. Any pleasure in their downfall is bittersweet though, because with each fall they become more human. Difficult to watch and easier to appreciate than enjoy, Margot At The Wedding might seem misanthropic, but it's actually just painfully honest.

Margot At The Wedding is out in the UK on 29th February 2008.