Jay Kelly

Exemplifying both the best and worst of Baumbach’s stylistic choices, this has moments of great emotion and pathos in the twin performances of Clooney and Sandler (Sandler is Oscar worthy here), and when Baumbach gets out of their way and lets them perform, you can see them breathing full life into the potentially stale “dark side of show-biz” material; the problems set in periodically when Baumbach almost appears to lose faith in his actors or the material, ramping up the emotional beats to exhausting, and engaging in some unforgivably schmaltzy and sentimentalising of his star (the beatific climax is cringe-inducing). A shame, because with a tougher edge, Clooney and Sandler could have easily carried this to masterpiece territory; an impressively star-studded ensemble are unfortunately given little to nothing to do, with the exception of Dern who manages to steal all her scenes.