Please give

Some actresses who lack a popular form of beauty become famous and relatively rich for being above-average players of supporting, character and cameo parts. Some still make it to the starry heights, as did Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton. Others await a juicy role of a lifetime, like Kathy Bates' Oscar-winning star turn in Misery. A few, such as Kristin Scott-Thomas, age gracefully and successfully in individual ways. One of her American cousins is Catherine Keener, whose Please Give is her fourth movie made with indie writer-director Nicole Holofcener.

Holofcener, whose stepfather was movie producer Charles Joffe, has only made four films, which suggests she and Keener collaborate well artistically. The rest of the ensemble cast is also effective in a sequence of sweet and sour set pieces built around New York flats, furniture and families.

Keener's perplexed socially-aware character and her laid-back husband (Oliver Platt) operate an above-average second-hand furniture store. They have a precocious teenage daughter (Sarah Spanglish Steele) with zits and an attitude problem that ranges from bitchiness to sentimentality, and they'd bought the next-door flat. It's occupied by an irritable old woman (Ann Guilbert, a TV series veteran from the sublime Dick Van Dyke Show to the ridiculous Nanny) and reverts to their ownership only when she does .

Her two grand-daughters run her errands and get involved with the neighbours. Amanda Peet (Whole Nine Yards) plays a sleek beautician who, inexplicably, lets Platt's podgy character start an affair with her, while her homely radiologist sister is a total contrast. The very busy British actress Rebecca Hall (Sir Peter's daughter) is another tall but wispy character (as in Dorian Gray and Vicky Cristina Barcelona) waiting for some scenery to chew.

This is another angst-edged character study of metropolitan family life , a bitter-sweet drawing-room comedy of manners, a world where many of American indie film-makers obviously feel at home in and need to criticise. Holofcener's latest review of middle-class mores is a small gem, but one that's been too meticulously worded, polished and honed. Its surface glistens while its essence feels coolly artificial.