Comfort zones: "Please Give"

The writer-director Nicole Holofcener's previous films - Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing and Friends with Money - marked her as one of the sharpest observers of modern mores to have survived the transition from independent to mainstream American cinema. (Whither now Whit Stillman, her closest male equivalent?) Please Give, Holofcener's latest, begins in rather scattered fashion before settling into some of the old, familiar, comforting rhythms.

Here are the inhabitants of two adjacent two-bedroom flats in the same Manhattan apartment block. Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are married furniture restorers. She's one of life's givers, whose generosity is such that her teenage daughter Abby (Sarah Steele) has started to resent the money her mom routinely hands over to homeless strangers on the street; he, on the other hand, oblivious to the ageing process, sees himself as far younger and hunkier than any character being played by Oliver Platt perhaps has a right to. Next door, meanwhile, we find two sisters weighing up what they might do with their fragile grandmother, and her desirable living space. Older sibling Molly (Amanda Peet) is a permatanned beauty salon worker who can't wait for the old bird to die; younger Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), a nurse in a mammography department, just wants to make gran's final days bearable.

As our introduction to Rebecca - the cinema's first mammography montage, and the most brilliant subversion yet of the common executive decree all movies should somehow work tits into their first five minutes - restates, Holofcener is acutely attuned to issues of body image and women's health; though her characters are relatively comfortable Manhattanites, they get frail, sick, vulnerable sometimes, are never too far from tears. The film displays a cross-generational empathy: the writing knows what it is, as a teenage girl, to feel like your nose is one giant zit, and catches the wearied tones of a fortysomething woman who's grown to live with (and accept her husband's mocking of) her odd-shaped toes, but Holofcener also knows how to write the horror growing on old dears who've come to realise their bodies are turning against them - and, not incidentally, offers many of the funniest lines to actresses in the twilight phase of their careers.

If Please Give is finally no great departure for its director, it nevertheless confirms Holofcener as a real boon for actors. Keener, as ever, remains a pleasure to watch, wracked with her own good intentions; Hall may be the most appealing and intelligent discovery the American cinema has made this decade; the sparky Steele is at least the equal of Raven Goodwin in Lovely & Amazing; and Holofcener even exercises such generally underused performers as Peet (tapping into the flinty notes that - as per 2002's Changing Lanes - are clearly this actress's strongest suit) and Platt (hilariously clueless as an idiot who somehow remains lovable even as he doesn't know what a fool he's being).

Granted, these characters tend to divide into the selfless and the selfish, givers and takers; only belatedly does the film accept you can watch Entertainment Tonight and still be an upright citizen. Still, there's something dramatically worthwhile in this opposition, and something heroic in Holofcener's insistence that women in movies can get beyond looking good to wrestle with the quandary of doing good. It remains an anomaly that Holofcener directed episodes of Sex and the City, albeit when it was at its televisual peak - or maybe a further indictment of the direction that series' big-screen spin-offs went in. Holofcener scarcely seems one to make a fuss over such things, but her work to date could legitimately qualify as the thinking woman's - heck, the thinking person's - alternative: far savvier on the topics of femalekind, property and clothes-buying, her cinema goes more than skin deep.

Please Give opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.