Jay Kelly (2025)

We liked this comedy-drama a lot in which mega movie star George Clooney plays the titular mega movie star trying to connect with his daughter, much to the frustration of his beleaguered manager Ron, played by Adam Sandler, and the rest of the star's team. The terrific and enormous supporting cast includes Riley Keough and Grace Edwards as Jay's daughters, Laura Dern as his publicist, Billy Crudup as his friend Timothy, Stacy Keach as his father, Jim Broadbent as his mentor, Eve Hewson as an actress in one of his movies, Emily Mortimer as his hairdresser, Greta Gerwig as Ron's wife, Sadie Sandler as his daughter, and Patrick Wilson as his other client.

Director Noah Baumbach co-wrote the script with Mortimer and the beautiful cinematography by Linus Sandgren and production design by Mark Tildesley contribute to the glossy look of the picture.

I'm streaming Nicholas Britell's lively score on Apple Music as I write. And this fun list of trivia points includes that clips from a number of Clooney's own work appear in this movie.

Clooney was last blogged for Ticket to Paradise, both Sandlers for You Are So Not Invited to my Bat Mitzvah, Keough for Zola, Edwards for Call Jane, Dern for JT LeRoy, Crudup for Jackie, Keach for Nebraska, Broadbent for The Duke, Hewson for Flora and Son, Mortimer for acting in Mary Poppins Returns and she co-wrote and created the series Doll & Em, in which she plays a famous actress who hires her best friend as her assistant. Gerwig was most recently in these pages (for acting) for White Noise, Wilson for Millers in Marriage, Baumbach for directing White Noise and for co-writing his life partner Gerwig's Barbie, Sandgren for shooting Saltburn, Tildesley for production designing Empire of Light, and Britell for scoring She Said.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics, averaging 76%, are less star-struck than its audiences at 87. So far the movie has eight wins, including being one of the top ten movies of the year for both American Film Institute and National Board of Review, as well as 38 other nominations.

Jack and I streamed it on Netflix on December 17.

Oh. What. Fun. (2025)

Jack and I had some laughs with this light and fluffy Christmas movie which we chose partly because of Denis Leary and partly because we wanted a comedy. Michelle Pfeiffer's Claire is a boomer #tradwife of Leary's Nick who arranges every Christmas detail for her family, but they all take her for granted. Untrue to form, Leary plays a character who is not snarky. The cast includes Felicity Jones as their grown daughter Channing, Jason Schwartzman as Channing's husband Doug, Chloe Grace Moretz as Channing's sister Taylor, and Eva Longoria as Claire's TV idol Zazzy. Danielle Brooks and Devery Jacobs make solid cameos.

Director Michael Showalter co-wrote the script with Chandler Baker. The soundtrack is by Siddhartha Khosla but, although he's a prolific composer, his score is not available for streaming. The songs in the movie are, however.

Leary was last blogged for Draft Day, Pfeiffer for French Exit, Jones for The Brutalist, Schwartzman for The Last Showgirl, Moretz for The Addams Family, Brooks for The Color Purple, and Showalter and Khosla for The Idea of You.

Longoria is best known for 180 episodes for Desperate Housewives from 2004-2012, but has dozens of other credits and I gave her short shrift for her cameo in In a World... We both loved Jacobs in all 25 episodes of Reservation Dogs and lawyer/novelist Baker makes her screenwriting debut.

I'm glad we enjoyed this movie before checking it on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics and audiences scrooged it (yeah, I know it's not a word) with averages of 35 and 27% respectively. We streamed it on December 10 on Prime.

Are We Good? (2025)

As fans of comedian/podcaster/actor/musician Marc Maron, Jack and I were inclined to love this documentary about him. We did. It features interviews with many other comics and archival footage of him before, during, and after his relationship with his late partner Lynn Shelton, who died suddenly of a blood disorder during lockdown. 

Director Steven Feinartz, who has directed two of Maron's stand-up specials, has been working on this for four years and, along with story editor Julie Seabaugh and three editors, has given us a delightful journey into the neurotic mind and life of the man. Composer Marlon Lang's soundtrack, not available online as far as I can tell, is supplemented by Maron's own guitar playing and occasional singing.

Maron's podcast WTF ended in October with episode #1686 after sixteen years (available at the above link or wherever you get your podcasts). He started by interviewing other comics and musicians and then branched out to other celebrities, recording in a studio in his southern California garage. Arguably, his interview #613 with President Obama in 2015 considerably widened Maron's fame, and Maron traveled to the Washington DC office of our favorite president to close out the series. We like to cherry pick episodes, generally 75-90 minutes long, including Maron's rambling, entertaining prologues, to play during road trips.

Thirty producers earns this a spot on my Producers Plethora Prize but it will be hard to get to the top, as the winner has 53!

Maron was last blogged for To Leslie. Feinartz has directed a bunch of comedians' specials and a few other projects, Seabaugh worked on one other comedy documentary, and this is Lang's second feature plus a few shorts.

Rotten Tomatoes critics are very, very good with an average of 97%, as are its audiences at 94. We rented this on December 6.

My regular readers may have noticed the paucity of documentaries in my blog. I know there are innumerable wonderful docs out there–many friends have recommended some–but I tend to be drawn to fiction first and foremost, and my to-watch list is long. That said, approximately 110 documentaries out of 1618 movies appear on this blog. In case you missed it, here's a link to the alphabetized index (the link is also available in the header of each web page of babetteflix).

Nouvelle Vague (New Wave - 2025) and Breathless (A bout de souffle - 1960)

After loving Richard Linklater's fictionalized reenactment of the making of Jean-Luc Godard's classic of French cinema Breathless, I felt compelled to watch the original. I had issues with the latter. More on that in a moment.

Nouvelle Vague is set in 1959 with almost all dialogue in French, starring Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, a confident director about to make his first feature film using unconventional methods, such as shooting on the streets with no audio recording (in order to dub in sound later). Aubrey Dullin is a good choice to play Jean-Paul Belmondo, the actor who was the lead in Breathless, as the resemblance is clear (however, apparently Belmondo's grandson auditioned but didn't get the part!). American actress Jean Seberg was Breathless's leading lady and Zoey Deutch delivers, including Seberg's appalling American-accented French.

As a former film student, I particularly appreciated its portrayals of great French filmmakers of the time, especially François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, who together "wrote the screenplay" (see below) with Godard. New Wave is what the style of filmmaking epitomized by Godard was called. Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol were film critics at the same magazine before they began to make their own.

Linklater works from a script apparently written in English by Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr., with the French translation by Michèle Pétin and Laetitia Masson. Here's an essay Linklater wrote about the movie.

There is no soundtrack composer, instead relying on jazz classics (five by saxophonist Zoot Sims, one by Count Basie), and a few more from the original movie and/or the era. I've noticed that Netflix and Apple don't always play well together, which might explain why the soundtrack is on Spotify and not Apple Music.

Everyone in the cast and crew except for Linklater, Deutch, Gent, and Palmo is French. The movie is presented in a 1.37:1 (AKA 4:3) aspect ratio, the same as Breathless, using vintage camera equipment and film stock. It was fun to see the black dots flash in the upper right corners of the screen, which, when everything was projected on film, were the cues for the projectionists to change the reels.

The problem I had with Breathless was that I detested the character of the leading man Michel, a narcissistic hustler played by Belmondo (I don't remember Richard Gere's portrayal in the 1983 remake--I may have been predisposed to like him in anything in my younger years). Yep, Seberg's French accent is terrible, and her delivery is flat, due, no doubt, to her having to dub it in later. Director Godard has a tiny cameo at the end, the character called Snitch.

However, there are no onscreen credits for cast nor crew. I had to glean it all from online research, such as naming "screenwriters" Truffaut and Chabrol. I recommend the trivia available online, which will explain my quotes, as well as why the pace is so choppy.

Martial Solal's soundtrack is available on Spotify. Apple Music does seem to have the audio of the entire 90 minute movie--dialogue plus soundtrack--if you're inclined to listen to it. I was not.

One photographic effect was the cigarette smoke floating around Belmondo at all times. In fact, everyone smoked in both movies.

Linklater was last blogged for Hit Man, Deutch for Buffaloed, Gent and Palmo for Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, and Godard (1930-2022) for Goodbye to Language. Marbeck, Dullin, Pétin, and Masson are new to me, but it should be noted that Pétin had a long personal and professional relationship with Godard. 

Belmondo (1933-2021) had 89 credits but the only one I've seen is Casino Royale (1967) and his part was small. Seberg (1938-1979) acted in 36 movies before committing suicide at 40. I was more familiar with Truffaut's (1932-1984) work, including The 400 Blows (1959), Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules and Jim (1962), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Day for Night (1973), The Story of Adele H (1975), The Last Metro (1980), and The Woman Next Door (1981). I don't know much about Chabrol (1930-2010).

Rotten Tomatoes' critics are newly waving hello to Nouvelle Vague with their average of 90%, while its audiences also say hi at 84. As of today the movie has four festival wins and eight other nominations. I watched it on Netflix on November 27.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics are breathless at 95% and its audiences gasping at 90. I streamed it on HBO with our subscription on December 7. It can also be rented.

Roofman (2025)

Jack and I quite enjoyed this based-on-a-true-story about a North Carolina thief who breaks into stores through their roofs after hours and later has to hide out in a Toys R Us in 2004. Channing Tatum is charming (name change?) in the title role, and Kirsten Dunst is also adorable as his love interest in the second act. Support comes from Peter Dinklage as the detestable store manager and Lakeith Stanfield and Juno Temple as the roofman's friends.

Director Derek Cianfrance spent many hours interviewing the actual roofman Jeffrey Manchester to contribute to the script Cianfrance co-wrote with Kirt Gunn.

The music by Christopher Bear, available on Apple Music, swings between soothing and mildly unsettling.

Tatum was last blogged for Fly Me to the Moon, Dunst for The Power of the Dog, Dinklage for Wicked, Stanfield for Judas and the Black Messiah, Temple for Wonder Wheel (three years before her 34 episodes of Ted Lasso as Keely), Cianfrance for Sound of Metal, and Bear for Past Lives. This is the second feature for Gunn, sixteen years after his first.

28 producers is no longer enough to land a spot on my Producers Plethora Prize list, but I thought I'd mention the number anyway. Rotten Tomatoes' critics and audiences aren't raising the ceiling at 86 and 85% averages, but they're still pretty high. We rented it on November 20.

Bugonia (2025)

We were captivated by this intense story of a madman and his autistic cousin who kidnap a pharmaceutical company CEO, convinced that she is an evil alien. Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone are terrific as brainy Teddy and shrewd Michelle, and Aiden Delbis is quite good as cousin Don. Alicia Silverstone has a cameo as Teddy's mother (I had to look her up because I knew she looked familiar).

Yorgos Lanthimos directs from a script by Will Tracy, based on the movie Save the Green Planet! (Jigureul jikyeora! - 2003), written by Jang Joon-Hwan. There is some violence and blood. Do not let anyone give you spoilers--the end was quite a twist for Jack and me. Apple Music describes Jerskin Fendrix's soundtrack as haunting, and they're not wrong.

Turns out that bugonia was an ancient Greek belief that bees spontaneously generated from the carcasses of cows. The character Teddy is a beekeeper.

You may have seen photos of Stone with a shaved head. She really did consent to that and said having a bald head was freeing, as well as feeling "amazing" in the shower. That explains her cute pixie cut early this year.

Plemons, Stone, Lanthimos, and Fendrix were all last blogged for Kinds of Kindness, Tracy for The Menu, and Silverstone for Book Club. Delbis, who chooses to be described as autistic, makes his acting debut after an open casting call.

Rotten Tomatoes critics are somewhat sweet on this, with averages of 87 and 84%, respectively. We rented it yesterday, December 4.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025)

I loved this trippy time-bending romance with stunning photography, chosen because of its stars Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell and particularly for its director Kogonada, though, like his last movie After Yang, it's a bit too dreamy for Jack's taste. The cast includes Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Jennifer Grant, Hamish Linklater, the voice of Jodie Turner-Smith, and many more.

Seth Reiss wrote the original screenplay, Joe Hisaishi composed the lovely score, now playing on my computer from Apple Music. We have Benjamin Loeb to thank for the beautiful cinematography.

Robbie was last blogged for Barbie, Farrell for The Banshees of Inisherin, Kogonada, Turner-Smith, and Loeb for After Yang, Kline for the live action version of Beauty and the Beast, Waller-Bridge for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Linklater for Nickel Boys, Reiss for The Menu, and Hisaishi for The Wind Rises. Grant, the daughter of Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon, is new to me, though she's worked a fair amount.

Critics from Rotten Tomatoes do not want the journey, with an ugly average of 37%, and its audiences aren't much prettier at 58. We rented it on November 4. If you choose to trust me over the aforementioned critics, stay and listen for an audio bonus at the end.