At some point in the middle of Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Laura Dern’s character, Liz—she’s part of the entourage accompanying George Clooney’s title character on a trip to Italy—gets up and walks out of the movie, never to return. Maybe she’s trying to tell us something.

The character of Jay Kelly is more or less an amalgam of Clooney himself, a renowned A-list American movie star gathering laurels in his mid-60s but desperately striving for something more personally meaningful. As imagined by director Baumbach (White Noise, Frances Ha) and co-writer/actor Emily Mortimer, Jay’s life alternates hectically between his routine studio acting jobs and satisfying the demands of his clamoring fan base—a group that includes his starved-for-affection family.

This movie lays an egg. There are wri

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