Film reviews: ‘Jay Kelly’ and ‘Sentimental Value’

Jay Kelly

Directed by Noah Baumbach (R)

★★★★

George Clooney’s newest film is “the definition of a movie that goes down easy,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Clooney plays the title character, an aging, George Clooney– like movie star, and director Noah Baumbach brings “a great deal of care and affection” to the task of showing how screen fame shapes a life. “But as much as I enjoyed a lot of Jay Kelly, on some level I didn’t buy it,” because the story demands that we believe Jay has a hidden cold side that Clooney is simply too warm and engaging to sell. The whole endeavor feels like “celebrity navel-gazing on an Olympian scale,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. Jay, realizing that he’s been so focused on his career that he’s neglected even his two daughters, chooses to accept a career tribute in Tuscany so he can see France and Italy with his college-bound youngest.

Because Clooney is all surface and Laura Dern, as Jay’s publicist, just rehashes the divorce attorney she played in Baumbach’s Marriage Story, Adam Sandler, as Jay’s calm, generous manager, gives the movie the only character worth caring about. But “what distinguishes Jay Kelly is also what drives Jay Kelly: the Teflon charisma of Clooney,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Like its star, the film, which will hit Netflix soon after its theatrical release, glides along until it finally reveals that charisma can rob other people of their lives. “Clooney plays it all so cool that he and the movie both sneak up on us.” And then you realize: He’s just given “the performance of his life.”

Sentimental Value

Directed by Joachim Trier (R)

★★★★

Joachim Trier’s “breathtaking” new film “cements his status as one of the working masters,” said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com. The Scandinavian director, best known for 2021’s The Worst Person in the World, has constructed a drama of his own about a father in the film business who’s struggling to reconnect with his previously neglected daughter. But Trier’s version is akin to “great fiction unfolding in feature film form.” Though we know there will be emotional breakthroughs for the central characters, “they don’t come melodramatically; they come gradually, patiently, and believably.”

Stellan Skarsgard plays a director who is turned down when he asks his actress daughter to star in his autobiographical new film, said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times, and because Skarsgard appears in so many roles, “I almost forgot how good he can be.” He and his daughter Nora, played by Worst Person standout Renate Reinsve, are both “greedily self-involved and irresistibly charismatic people,” and Skarsgard and Reinsve prove to be “beautifully in sync.” Both will be Oscar contenders, said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times, even though Elle Fanning is better still as the American star who takes the role Nora rejected. Trier, meanwhile, comes across as divided. He flirts with making Sentimental Value a feisty industry satire yet “seems very aware that the audience for his kind of niche hit wants to sniffle at delicate emotions.” His title, in fact, “seems to be as much about that as anything.”