Holofcener possesses a genius for creating exquisitely realized characters who seem to have led full, rich, complicated lives before the film's first scene takes place, and will go on living complex, idiosyncratic existences long after they disappear from the screen. Of course, it doesn't hurt that she has four of the best actresses in Hollywood as the leads, especially Keener.

Smart, witty and alert to the buried resentments that poke through the shiny surface of affluence, Holofcener's film recognizes that money is the new sex.

A pitch-perfect ensemble comedy that burrows deep into the mind-set of white, upper middle-class Angelenos, anxious to strike the right balance among career, family, love life and money but never quite pulling it off.

There is also a manufactured symmetry, an every-gal's-got-issues roundness, an HBO sitcomitude to the movie that undercuts its own observational intelligence.

With the almost half-decade spaces between Holofcener's three features, one might (rather unreasonably, I admit) expect her to have sought to break wholly new ground in the interim. So she hasn't; nevertheless, Friends is well-crafted, intelligent, genuinely adult fare.