A. O. Scott At The New York Times Likes "Greenberg"

More reviews!:

To some extent, “Greenberg,” like nearly all of Mr. Baumbach’s work going back to “Kicking and Screaming,” is a comedy of manners. West Coast versions of the hyper-articulate recent college graduates of that movie, his 1995 directing debut, have grown up and been supplanted by a strange new generation. Some of the humor in “Greenberg” comes from the various collisions between youth and middle age. Kids these days! They don’t know what you’re talking about when you quote “Wall Street,” and they don’t appreciate Duran Duran. Damned Internet!

...It is partly arrested development — the refusal to act his age — that draws Roger to Florence, who functions less as a standard love interest than as his mirror image and moral counterweight. Like Roger, she is lonely and adrift, but her identity crisis is different from his. While he is aggressive even at times of indecision, Florence, at her most decisive, still seems tentative and hesitant.

...Her problem is that she is not sure what or who else should have value to her. Florence is in the early stages of the battle for love and success, having taken her marching orders along with her college degree. But she has only a vague sense of the mission.

...But “Greenberg” is not easily forgotten, and the misery of Roger’s company provides its own special kind of pleasure. Mr. Baumbach’s sense of character and place is so precise — the film seems so transparent, so real — that his formal audacity almost passes unnoticed. Rather than push Roger and Florence through the grinding machinery of an overdetermined plot, he allows them to wander and sometimes to stall, to inhabit their lives fully and uneasily. They are more like characters in a French movie than the people you usually meet under the Hollywood sign.

Only at the end, in the wake of a brilliantly executed party sequence — in which Roger, the solitary Gen-Xer, finds his world of defensive ironies and carefully preserved pop cultural references overrun and trashed by a swarm of Millennials — does his arc, as residents of Hollywood might call it, become apparent. Mr. Baumbach abruptly, and with a subtle display of self-conscious wit, reveals “Greenberg” to have been a romantic comedy all along. Here we are in a car speeding toward the airport and what might be the prospect of a happy ending. And suddenly a movie about a man who is defiantly difficult to like becomes very hard not to love.