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Gillian Robespierre’s quietly spectacular dramedy, Landline, traces a family’s 1990s implosion via spectacular ensemble work from the likes of Jenny Slate, John Turturro, and Edie Falco.

- Ben Dickinson

“We didn’t want to be slaves to modern technology and social media and to rely on text messaging as a story device,” says writer director Gillian Robespierre about setting her new film, Landline, very specifically in 1995. The film rigorously re-creates, among other period elements, that era’s relatively primitive pre-Internet telephonic and computing technology. “Also, I came of age in New York in the ’90s. There was a thriving middle class in Manhattan that doesn’t really exist anymore. I think,” she hastens to add, “that every generation of New Yorkers thinks that the era before the current one was better.”