Review: The Bad Dads of Jay Kelly and Sentimental Value

Jay Kelly arrives at a weird prolonged moment in Hollywood. It’s a movie about a movie star, released at a time when movie stars’ heyday has passed, and it is more or less loving in its lens on the movie industry, and by extension the theatrical experience, even as distributor Netflix poses an existential threat to moviegoing. Now, moaning about the streaming giant in the year 2025 is beyond passé, and to be fair, Netflix has written some very big checks to indie artists like Noah Baumbach who otherwise surely would have struggled to finance their films. But the irony is thick: In most of the country, this rueful paean to Hollywood, which ends in the dark of a movie theatre, will be experienced from the modesty of the living room couch. (In Austin, it’s showing exclusively at IPIC Theater.)

As with Baumbach’s last film, 2022’s nutty Don DeLillo adaptation White Noise, the Netflix money is all over the screen: firstly, in securing Certified If Gently Diminished Movie Star George Clooney as the titular Jay Kelly, and then in placing him in a series of stylish and expensive scenarios, from a buzzing studio lot and Jay’s California mansion to a Parisian train and finally Tuscany for a career retrospective award that Jay is accepting somewhat reluctantly.   

Jay travels to Europe with an entourage that includes (big breath) his longtime manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), whose tender caretaking of Jay is pulling focus from Ron’s own family; publicist Liz (Laura Dern), who is more actively questioning her total devotion to the job; a hair and makeup stylist (Emily Mortimer, who co-wrote the script with Baumbach); a bodyguard; a social media person; and so on. There is always at least one body hovering close by to tend to Jay’s every need, but even when he’s alone, his thoughts are crowded. This retrospective, and the recent death of a mentor, is making him brood. As Jay revisits his past – sometimes quite literally, stepping into a memory as he moves between train cars, for instance – Jay becomes more and more burdened with the choices he made to advance his career, at the expense of a life. 

Tonally, that puts Jay Kelly on a bit of a seesaw, scene to scene recalling Fellini’s 8 1/2 then a James L. Brooks-like dramedy (one of the late-career, baggier pictures, disappointingly). There are amusing observations throughout, especially when it comes to the epic bizarreness of Jay’s megastardom – to be at once the most powerful and/or adored person in every room he walks into, while also infantilized at every turn, a cash cow and glorified mannequin to be dusted with bronzer, lint-rolled, and fretted over – and Clooney gamely resists winking about the meta-ness of it all. 

But that’s just a side quest. The meat of the film is about exploring – justifying – Jay as a bad dad. Divorce is Noah Baumbach’s forever obsession: Tracing his career, it’s a remarkable arc from the semi-autobiographical The Squid and the Whale, with its hard stare at parents failing their children; to the unflinching, career-best Marriage Story, which centered the parents (and came in the wake of Baumbach’s own divorce); to Jay Kelly, which pretends to want to understand the pain Jay’s daughters still feel from dad’s absence and indifference, but comes off instead as glib and defensive. A therapy session between Jay and his now-adult eldest (Riley Keough) is played for sour laughs. A subplot about Jay’s dad, a bullying jerk (Stacy Keach), serves to whitewash Jay’s own parental misdeeds. This is generational pain, after all. 

Family is Jay Kelly’s chief preoccupation, and the film itself is something of a family affair: Baumbach’s wife, Greta Gerwig, appears, as does Sandler’s daughter, and the cast is studded with return collaborators, including Sandler (doing nice work with a character that arguably should have been the lead) and cameos from Josh Hamilton and Carlos Jacott, who go back to Baumbach’s very first film, 1995’s Kicking and Screaming. The familiar faces inject instant warmth, but I’m not sure it’s entirely earned. By the time Jay Kelly arrived at its last line – buffed to a bland sheen, as if the whole film was reverse-engineered to land there – I had cooled considerably.

By coincidence, another new release also dramatizes an aging titan of film and the damage done to his daughters. Only Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value – which opened at the Alamo South Lamar last week and expands to AFS Cinema this Friday – centers the daughters’ experience.

Eldest Nora (Renate Reinsve) is an acclaimed TV and stage actress in Oslo who’s never entirely forgiven her father, film director Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), for abandoning the family. Meanwhile, younger daughter Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) – who starred as a child in one of her father’s films, and is notably less interesting to him for having since given up acting – is caught in between, trying to maintain peace between Gustav and Nora, and keep an eye on her sister, who is prone to anxiety and depression. That Gustav has now written a semi-autobiographical, comeback script and hired a Hollywood actress (Elle Fanning) to play the part he originally wrote for daughter Nora and plans to shoot the film in the family home – well, that’s not doing much for Nora’s already-shaky mental health. 

Sentimental Value doesn’t foreground Gustav, but the fact of him – more often than not, the absence of him – dominates his daughters’ lives anyway. When he is attentive, they glow. When he turns away, you can see the sting of his rejection breadcrumb all the way back to their childhood. In the twilight of his career and surprisingly never Oscar-nominated, Skarsgård is a shoo-in for a supporting actor nomination, coolly effective at Gustav in all his guises: charismatic, undermining, casually cruel, devoted to his art, and ultimately, a giant dimmed. 

Still, as with Trier’s last film, The Worst Person in the World, his international breakthrough, Reinsve is the main event. She is heart-palpitating in her depiction of stage fright at film’s beginning, heart-stilling in how she illustrates Nora’s deepening sadness, heart-breaking in how she reacts to the story of her young nephew telling his father “I see you” with the accidental profundity of a child. I see you. It utterly wrecks her. 

Sentimental Value lacks the giddy bracinginess of The Worst Person in the World; it’s a more measured, more meditative thing. It is also a return to form, of a sort. Like Reprise and Oslo, August 31st, Trier’s earliest films (co-written, along with the rest of his filmography, with Eskil Vogt), Sentimental Value is about depression. (A legacy of it, in fact – more generational pain.) Trier’s films don’t treat depression like something that’s got to get fixed, or relegate the depression to a secondary character, othering it. Uniquely, depression feels first-person-lived in a Trier film. Just as uniquely, it’s not a downer. Honestly? I felt seen.

This article appears in November 21 • 2025.