The Berkmans - once promising author Bernard (Daniels) and burgeoning novelist Joan (Linney) - are at war.

Bernard resents his wife's new-found success almost as much as the numerous affairs with "philistines" she has conducted around the neighbourhood.

She has nothing but disdain for his literary pretensions ("Kafka was one of my predecessors"), his malicious quips fuelled by intellectual snobbery and his emotional absence from the marriage.

Delivered a grandstand view of the collapsing relationship are teenager Walt (Eisenberg) and his 11-year-old brother Frank (Kline) - adolescents with problems of their own.

Walt happily claims a ponderous Pink Floyd song as his own for a college recital because "I felt I could have written it so the fact it was already written was a kind of a technicality."

Very much his father's son, he keeps a cynical emotional distance from his first love Claire (Sophie Feiffer) because he suspects she might not be worthy of his affections.

Frank - staunch defender of his mother when he's not pondering her extra-marital sex life - swigs beer and apparently develops Tourettes when he's losing at ping-pong or tennis.

Used as sticks by which his parents can beat each other, the boys pinball across Brooklyn's Prospect Park on alternating weekends of custody.

The audience watches aghast as the family heads for an emotional meltdown with the boys forced into a damaged adulthood by parents who behave like spoilt children.

Writer and director Noah Baumbach has mined his formative experiences of divorce to craft a movie that is as hilariously funny as it is desperately sad.

The performances are flawless - Linny and Bridges' vicious warring occasionally lightened by a brief recognition of what brought them together.

Never lapsing into melodrama or broad farce, Baumbach's eye for telling detail and ear for authentic dialogue ensures you really have been watching a relationship in self-destruct.

Tim Evans