Jay Kelly (2025)

This is complicated, and while it may not represent the experience of those in the movie industry, the director and writer Noah Braumbuch, at least knows what he is talking about. He and his spouse have had various roles in movies, and they both make smart and insightful films. In this one we focus on a man in the middle of a crisis of sorts. He worries that he doesn’t have one, only the personalities which fictional characters and the glory of celebrity have granted him. It’s pretty meta, a movie that uses as its foundation what we know of its star, George Clooney, one of the few leading men who can coexist in the same frame with images of legends like Paul Newman and Marcello Mastroianni and we don’t immediately reject the idea. Clooney knows a thing or two about not being able to walk through public spaces without being mobbed and, one presumes, about how much the life of an actor pulls people away from other things in their lives, like friends and family. He is struggling on all levels, and as a result he becomes a bad friend, a bad parent, and a bad employee, all the while not really figuring it out. My advice? Therapy and also what Clooney himself has done, sought aspects of a more normal family life to help add layers of human interactions to his otherwise storied life--and to try not to take yourself too seriously.