Newlyweds Noah Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh (Photo: George Pimentel / WireImage)

I guess it is officially Noah Baumbach Week in NYC. First, we had the successful New York Film Festival premiere for his outstanding The Squid and the Whale (followed by some after-party that was rumored to be quite classic). Yesterday, People Magazine broke the "news" that Baumbach and actress Jennifer Jason Leigh tied the knot over Labor Day weekend. And now we have the reverent package in this week's Village Voice—where Baumbach's mother (and subject of S&W's semi-autobiography) Georgia Brown spent the better part of a decade as a film critic.

As such, the Voice's Baumbach treatment yields a much deeper sensitivity than last week's fawning over David Cronenberg; but this has less to do with the filmmakers' dispositions and polar-opposite subject matter than it does with the Voice's genuine identification with Baumbach's film. Among the inclusions that eschew the paper's trademark abstract hyperbole for something a little more authentic, the most notable seem to address Brown as one of her son's primary influences. Take Baumbach's conversation with Jessica Winter, for example:

"What interested me about my mom's film criticism was that she really valued an emotional reaction to a movie. I remember she gave Indecent Proposal a good review, and she took a lot of flak for that from me and other people, but she allowed herself to fall for it, and that's OK. Certainly, in context with the way I grew up, I find that very touching. I feel that with this movie I learned the value of an emotional approach to filmmaking. I made an emotional movie about intellectuals."

Or take J. Hoberman's glowing review:

Full disclosure: If I hadn't liked The Squid and the Whale so much, I might have begged off reviewing. For, while I have only the slightest personal acquaintance with the filmmaker, I do know his brother, his father, and particularly, his mother, former Voice movie critic Georgia Brown. From this privileged position, the movie is, of course, additionally fascinating—albeit not so much for what the filmmaker reveals about his family but how he chooses to represent them. … I don't necessarily recognize Baumbach's actual family in The Squid and the Whale but I do recognize the artist's ruthlessness—and the degree to which he's been true to their aesthetic family values.

Or, better yet, take Rob Nelson's brilliant, all-too-brief glimpse into Georgia Brown's critical legacy:

(S)aying the relevant things that critics in comfier berths had tacitly agreed not to say was, for Brown, both a compulsion and a calling. In other words: She distinguished herself as a critic simply by acting as a journalist. And yet the style of her work was equally rare: colloquial but probing, rhythmically precise but tonally ethereal, applicable to everything from Nichols's Regarding Henry ("Let's hear it for brain damage") to Chungking Express ("a Jules and Jim for our anonymous time"), from her fascination with Siskel & Ebert ("Anticipation of Gene's revenge, I suppose, is what keeps this soap opera going") to her dismay upon discovering that a New York Film Festival screening of Chris Marker's The Last Bolshevik, to which she had arrived very early, was only half full. ("In the so-called capital of the art world, who attends to the art of cinema?" she was compelled to wonder.)

Words to live by, folks, and thanks to Baumbach and the Voice—at least for this week—we can revel in the emotion, intellect and minor miracles that the greatest of all arts provides.