Venice: Noah Baumbach's Awards Hopeful "Jay Kelly"

by Elisa Giudici

George Clooney and Adam Sandler in "JAY KELLY" Photo by Peter Mountain © 2025 Netflix ,Inc

When Noah Baumbach presented White Noise on Netflix, expectations were sky-high: a star-studded cast, major ambitions, and the aura of a filmmaker fresh off Marriage Story. The film’s muted reception, however, seemed to threaten his trajectory, leaving a lingering sense of failure. Jay Kelly, his latest feature, feels like a response to that setback. Not so much a radical departure, but a project with a clearer aim: to offer George Clooney and Adam Sandler two roles carefully designed for visibility, prestige, and perhaps even awards...

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Review: 'Ticket to Paradise'

By: Christopher James

It's an Ocean's Eleven reunion, as George Clooney and Julia Roberts headline "Ticket to Paradise"They don’t make them like they used to.

I’m talking about movie stars, not movies. From frame one of Ticket to Paradise, Universal’s new romantic comedy, George Clooney and Julia Roberts have not just expertly defined their “love to hate” relationship. They’ve also reminded the audience that movie stars like them don’t exist anymore, and it’s a damn shame. Clooney’s twinkly eye and Roberts’ infectiously wide grin both make them instantly recognizable. However, both actors are shrewd enough to know how to use their movie star gifts for maximum effort. Ticket to Paradise hardly reinvents the wheel, but it is a breezy enough excuse to reunite the Ocean’s Eleven co-stars for an incredibly fun and funny trip to Bali.

The stage is set pretty quickly.

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Tweetweek: Sleepovers, time loops, and one very gay summer

First, two tweets that stunned us in their perceptiveness. Exactly right on both counts.

Long overdue rewatch of A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and it occurs to me that the exact same narrative material that is dealt with here in 96 minutes would now cover five seasons of a ‘prestige’ streaming drama.

— Jeff Billington (@faces_of_jeff) June 30, 2022

the multiverse and time loops displaced time travel as a genre bc we no longer agree on the past or believe in the future, just infinite minuscule variations on the present

— Tony Tulathimutte (@tonytula) July 5, 2022

More curated and mostly amusing tweets for you after the jump featuring George Clooney's batsuit, Barbie sleepovers, a perplexing Dianne Wiest situation, Alien  & Predator trivia, the summer of 92 at the movies, and more ...

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Podcast: West Side Story, The Tender Bar, Don't Look Up... and Faye Dunaway?

Nick and Nathaniel reunion finale (part 3 of 3). Dear readers we hope you've enjoyed this epic talk between your host here and the long lost Nick Davis. Here's the final part in which we talk more 2021 movies plus a discussion of Gena Rowlands and Faye Dunaway due to the new class Nick is teaching.

 

78 minutes
00:01 Lana Wachowski going full meta in Matrix Resurrections
10:15 Nick's trouble with Leos Carax's Annette  (with some Pola X history)
17:50 Tony Kushner's reworking of West Side Story and its redux performances. Plus a bit of In the Heights thrown in for reasons Nathaniel objects to
32:00 France's Petite Maman  and Austria's Great Freedom 
39:30 Adam McKay's Don't Look Up and its limitations as well as the harsh critical response
47:00 An extremely odd double feature: Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch and George Clooney's The Tender Bar 
          BIG ACTRESSEXUAL FINISH
1:01:06 Nick is teaching a class called "Female Performance in Modern Hollywood" so we discuss our favourite Faye Dunaway and Gena Rowlands performances (with very brief asides to several other post-Method actresses)

You can listen to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or Spotify or download the attachment below. If you missed our previous recent discussion covering a full dozen 2021 movies, that's here. 

West Side Tender Bar with Faye

Review: "The Tender Bar" Is Sweet, But Slight

Ben Affleck becomes a surrogate Uncle in George Clooney's latest directorial film, "The Tender Bar."

By: Christopher James

Can two movie stars squander each other’s talent? George Clooney directs Ben Affleck in Amazon Prime’s latest movie, The Tender Bar, a navel-gazing tale that takes every cheap shot possible to drum up emotion. Lucky for it, cheap shots can still be effective. Parents around the world will be charmed by the ‘70s set, decades spanning family drama. After all, Ben Affleck and director George Clooney are front and center in the movie’s marketing. Though effective in fits and starts, the wistful sentimentality curdles with time. 

Once they run out of money, single mother Dorothy Moehringer (Lily Rabe) returns to her Long Island home with her tail between her legs and her son, J.R. (Daniel Ranieri), in tow...

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