Opening Night: Landline

Welcome to the ’90s. Dana (Jenny Slate) is a magazine art-department grunt who’s feeling apprehensive about marrying her boyfriend (Transparent’s Jay Duplass) and guilty over pining for an old college friend (Finn Wittrock). Her younger sister, Ali (newcomer Abby Quinn), is an NYU student flirting with after-hours clubbing and fluent in enraging her exasperated parents. As for Mom (Edie Falco) and Dad (John Turturro), they’re busy dealing with a failing marriage, possible infidelities, and mutual career frustration. Running around a Giuliani-era Manhattan filled with hipster record stores, druggy raves, and pre-internet poetry slams, these middle-class New Yorkers are simply trying to find their own personal bliss to follow—and hopefully, some sort of landline to keep them grounded. Director-cowriter Gillian Robespierre reunites with her Obvious Child (Festival 2014) star for a follow-up that’s just as comically left-of-center and slyly moving, as well as indulging a nostalgia for the days of Mac II floppy disks and CD shopping. Buoyed by a bubbly, beautifully neurotic performance by Slate and blessed with an indie-film who’s-who ensemble cast, this look at those transitional moments in life—when you’re stuck between commitment and freedom, teen angst and adult disappointment, and laughing and sobbing—hits home in a way that feels completely timeless. —David Fear