Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach, 2025). Noah Baumbach’s grimly comic character study about celebrity privilege is maudlin and astoundingly inauthentic. George Clooney plays Jay Kelly, an aging movie star who’s on the downslope of his career. Feeling his mortality, Jay tries to mend various relationships in his life. He aggressively strains to bond with his somewhat distant teenage daughter (Grace Edwards), in part because there’s no mending the scorched earth between him and his elder offspring (Riley Keough). He also reaches out to an old classmate (Billy Crudup) who experienced a very different journey in his attempts to become a professional actor. All the while, Jay continues to neglect the people who are actually closest to him, his various personal employees, including his manager (Adam Sandler) and publicist (Laura Dern). Baumbach’s directing is arch and stiff, and his screenplay (co-written with Emily Mortimer) is filled with tepid lines that are held up for admiration as if they deliver devastating emotional blows. Dern is the only performer in Jay Kelly who gives the lines any spin. Everyone else struggles to connect with any deeper feeling that would give weight to this vapid tale. The comedy isn’t funny, and the drama comes across as cheaply manufactured.

Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938). Bringing Up Baby stakes a convincing claim on being the best screwball comedy ever made, which means it’s also in the conversation for one of the best movies ever made, period. That feels like hyperbole even as I type it, but it’s more like understatement when in the thrall of its rapid-fire wit and headlong energy. The back and forth between zingy socialite Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) and buttoned-up paleontologist David Huxley (Cary Grant) is ludicrously enticing. Whether they’re bickering or flirting, or both simultaneously, the exchanges are a delight. The screenplay, credited to Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, is masterfully constructed, and Howard Hawks proves there were few better at keeping a picture moving. Even as there are nice performances throughout the supporting cast, Grant and Hepburn are the undeniable centers of gravity. Grant was probably never better than here, miraculously making exasperation a narrow thread removed from hopelessly turned on. Hepburn really owns the film, brashly chattering and swooning away. The moment late in the Bringing Up Baby when she adopts the persona Swinging Door Susie is a whole other level of great.

Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson, 2025). Writer-director Rian Johnson’s third outing with brilliant detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) shifts away from previous explorations of greed and capitalism to take on religion, that other key pivot point of American power. Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) is an idealistic priest with a low tolerance for bullies, a sometimes counterproductive attribute that is tested when he’s assigned to a parish under the bullheaded monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). An apparent murder occurs, and Jud is the prime suspect in need of Blanc’s deductive powers to clear his name by identifying the real killer. Wake Up Dead Man is enjoyably clever, and it’s satisfying that Johnson uses the Blanc-iverse as a repository for ideas about warped piety and cult of personality–driven self-destruction. I’m also entertained by Johnson’s usual creativity in casting, giving crafty, often undervalued actors a chance to really play around. Although I’d never identify hers as the film’s best performance, I’m especially amused by Mila Kunis’s “Oh, no. Now what?” turn as a police chief. Even so, as with Glass Onion, it’s hard to avoid feeling Johnson is in a bit of a rut, and he’d benefit taking the time to pursue a few other original ideas before bringing Benoit back again.