They say write what you know, which is probably why there are so many damn films about Hollywood. The latest navel-gazer, Jay Kelly, is about an aging movie star (played, not coincidentally, by aging movie star George Clooney) reflecting on his life and his choices. The film is directed with care and style and generous (if occasionally gimmicky) wit by Noah Baumbach and the performances by both Clooney and Adam Sandler as Ron Sukenick, Jay’s long-suffering manager, are excellent. But a little part of me was like, remind me again why I’m supposed cares about this vain multimillionaire and his extremely niche problems?

Having just wrapped his latest film, the 60-year-old Jay is having an existential crisis, of sorts. It has dawned on him that he spent so much time building his career, his life is empty. He’s neglected the two most important relationships of his life, namely with his daughters. He doesn’t really know who he is beyond the glamorous façade and he has no real friends, other than Ron, who is on the payroll.

If you’re thinking this all sounds a bit familiar that’s because a very similar film came out of Norway earlier this season, Sentimental Value. I’m not going to make broad generalizations about American vs. European films—especially since Baumbach is the spiritual successor to Woody Allen who was deeply influenced by the European greats—but suffice it to say that the Norwegian one, which focused mainly on the inner lives of the abandoned daughters, was better.

The crux of Jay Kelly is that our titular hero is always surrounded by a coterie that includes his manager, a stylist (Emily Mortimer, who co-wrote the script), a bodyguard-cum-butler, a publicist (Laura Dern), and various other hangers on, but he’s supremely lonely. (An on-going joke has Jay complaining he’s always alone just as his bodyguard hands him a cold drink.)

And Ron is beginning to reassess his devotion to Jay. He’s given the better part of his life to this man—willing to drop any other commitment, including to his own children, on a dime to attend to him—but was it all worth it? Are they even friends?

“Friends don’t take 15 percent,” Jay snaps to Ron during one particularly bruising fight.

But at least Ron still has his family—although his wife (Baumbach’s real-life partner Greta Gerwig in what amounts to an extended cameo) blames him for their daughter’s almost debilitating anxiety. Jay, however, is essentially on his own. His oldest daughter, Jessica (Riley Keough), has all but given up on him. “You know how I know you didn’t want to spend time with me?” she asks him bitterly. “Because you didn’t spend time with me.”

Oof.

And he now he finds himself desperate to connect with his younger daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards), who is about to embark on a European vacation with her friends before heading off for college.

Daisy has more fondness, or at least more patience, with her dad—she finds him amusing—but she isn’t going to suddenly disrupt her life to spend time with him. She heads off on her own.

Jay Kelly occasionally employs an A Christmas Carol-style structure where Jay revisits pivotal scenes of his life. One comes after he finds out that the director who gave him his first big break, Peter Scheider (Jim Broadbent), has died. Jay is indebted to Schneider, or should be, at least—and they’ve remained friends. But one of those flashbacks has Schneider begging Jay to do his latest film, as he needs the money. With a kind of cold efficiency masking as kindness, Jay refuses him. We see this a lot with Jay. He is good at indicating friendship and generosity of spirit, but there’s no substance behind his cheer.

At Schneider’s funeral, Jay reconnects with his old acting school roommate, Timothy (Billy Crudup). Turns out, despite his eagerness to grab a beer, Timothy despises Jay—blames him for stealing his life. It is, in fact, not an exaggeration. In another flashback we see cocky young Jay (now played by Charlie Rowe, not quite convincingly) snatch an audition for Schneider’s film right out from under Timothy (Louis Partridge), even using Timothy’s own improvements to the script that Timothy was too shy to incorporate. (The suggestion here is twofold: Yes, Jay stole from Timothy. But also, Jay had the kind of ballsiness to make those embellishments to the script. When he tells Timothy he didn’t have what it took, was he possibly…right?)

Finding out that his old friend, about whom he has warmly nostalgic feelings, actually hates his guts is another turning point for Jay. He’s more determined than ever to repair his relationship with Daisy—perhaps his last hope for redemption—so decides to track her down in Europe, using a lifetime achievement award he’ll be receiving from the Tuscan Film Festival as his excuse.

In one of the film’s most irritating scenes, he is forced to take a train from Paris to Rome with the actual little people, who are depicted as kindly, salt-of-the-earth types; a train full of Mrs. Clauses and Geppettos. Jay watches them, moist-eyed, thinking this is what he has missed in life. It’s beyond patronizing, although Baumbach adds a small dose of reality when someone points out to Jay that the people are on their best behavior because they’re in front of a movie star. Later in the train ride, Jay pulls a Tom Cruise and catches a purse snatcher—it’s a clear inside joke as Clooney even does Cruise’s intense, arm pumping run to catch up to him. Jay is hailed as a hero, but even that is complicated. The man who stole the purse isn’t a hardened criminal but a family man off his meds. (Again, it felt like Baumbach was fighting against his own impulses in that scene.)

Recently, after watching Jerry Maguire for the first time in years, I complained that they didn’t make middlebrow films like that anymore—that is, smart and satisfying, if somewhat facile, films for grownups. This is definitely that. And there’s excellent here work from Clooney, who gives arguably his best performance ever in this a meta dissection of his own career and of the strange paradox of having a life that belongs to everyone but yourself.

[WARNING: HERE COMES A SPOILER OF SORTS BECAUSE I WANT TO DISCUSS THE FINAL SCENE]

Jay Kelly is ultimately a film about a man living with the consequences of his own narcissism but the final scene, at the Tuscan film festival, does hedge its bets a bit: We see a montage of Jay/Clooney’s films and it brings tears to his eyes. He was great. He did move people. It was a wonderful life, in its own way. He’s so touched by what he sees on screen that he reaches out for the hand of a loved one—but there’s only Ron, so he clutches his hand instead. It’s both sad and kind of beautiful. The film has sneakily been a love story between these two hollow men the whole time.

No mystery is solved in Charlie Shackleton’s essayistic doodad “Zodiac Killer Project,” but the true-crime genre itself is certainly staked out and interrogated like a prime suspect. Then again, there’s nothing like the tweezer focus of an obsessive — either trying to crack a maddening case or devouring shows about them on Netflix — to put our darker yearnings for fulfillment on queasy display, while reveling in minutiae at the same time.

Shackleton, a British filmmaker with an avant-garde sensibility, was all set to make his own opus, based on the investigative musings of a Vallejo cop who believed he’d discovered the identity of the infamous Zodiac killer who terrorized the Bay Area in the late ’60s, taunting police with letters and cryptograms, never to be caught. Shackleton’s fascination with former highway patrol officer Lyndon Lafferty’s speculative memoir “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up,” which details a years-long quest to bring his pinpointed suspect to justice in the face of a perceived conspiracy, led to a bid for the rights. When that fell through, a different film project emerged.

Composed of original footage and the director’s conversational voice-over, “Zodiac Killer Project” is the chalk outline of his missing and presumed dead documentary. Shackleton explains his conceptual framework for it over long takes of serene, sunny Vallejo locations: an empty parking lot, a church, an intersection, a wooded house. We hear what perfectly designed re-creation he would have mounted there — or, since these aren’t necessarily the sites specified in Lafferty’s narrative and Shackleton is nothing if not honest, filmed at a place just like it.

In one sense, what we’re watching is a wittily rueful pitch session for an Errol Morris-style homage that never was, flecked with inserts we learn are called “evocative b-roll” (the swinging overhead lamp, the gun in someone’s hand), shots meant to be artfully slotted alongside his imagined interviews with key participants. Shackleton, glimpsed on camera in the studio where he vamped his narration, knows his act breaks and thematic beats.

And yet his abandoned undertaking is also a mischievous explosion of a storytelling format, a knowing critique of this most-wanted genre’s longstanding tropes: the eerie credit sequences, montages and music cues. Don’t expect a rehash of the Zodiac case, nor the parts of Lafferty’s book he can’t legally talk about. Settle in for some amusing dissections of popular docuseries like “Making a Murderer” and “The Jinx,” as well as the simultaneously moralizing and exploitative “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.”

Of course, Shackleton is an openly avid connoisseur of those titles too, and it’s sometimes difficult to discern from the glibness of his tone whether he’s pointing the finger at himself or pining over rejection from a club he clearly wanted to join. That can leave the occasionally repetitive “Zodiac Killer Project” with a shallow aftertaste to go with its smarts. But in a year that’s seen a valuable rethink of how we process crime stories — from the eye-opening documentaries “Predators” and “The Perfect Neighbor” to Caroline Fraser’s deeply researched book “Murderland” — Shackleton’s perspective is still an intriguing, worthy provocation regarding our cultural bloodlust.

Dust Bunny, 2025.

Written and Directed by Bryan Fuller.
Starring Sophie Sloan, Mads Mikkelsen, Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian, Rebecca Henderson, Sheila Atim, and Nóra Trokán.

SYNOPSIS:

An eight-year-old girl asks her scheming neighbor for help in killing the monster under her bed that she thinks ate her family.

As far as cinematic metaphors go, the idea of monsters as hitmen from the perspective of an eight-year-old girl is rather inspired. It also works since writer/director Bryan Fuller doesn’t stop at just the idea, but also grounds Dust Bunny in a fantasy-lite world that keeps viewers on their toes, wondering what is real and what is magical, even when we begin to suspect where the filmmaker will inevitably go with the answers.

Similarly, the script is also whimsical, sometimes rhymes, and peppered with humor that brings to mind a children’s fairytale. Everything about Bryan Fuller’s narrative vision is so confidently and imaginatively realized that it also doesn’t matter that he doesn’t necessarily have the financial backing to ensure the CGI is top-of-the-line, although it is serviceable for the material.

Terrified of the monster under her bed (a monstrously oversized dust bunny), Aurora’s (Sophie Sloan) parents naturally assume she is fibbing and that her fears are the result of a hyperactive imagination. Her parents are murdered offscreen, though, by something, and given that much of the film is from her perspective, that is accomplished through special-effects-driven moving floorboards and destruction. The monster also seems to come out only when someone touches the floor (which no one believes Aurora about), meaning the now-orphaned girl moves around her house in a makeshift boat. This also means that this is not the first time monsters have gotten her parents.

One night, Aurora notices a stranger (credited as Intriguing Neighbor and played by regular Bryan Fuller collaborator, the endlessly engaging no matter the role, Mads Mikkelsen, here in what is tonally a riff on Leon the Professional by way of Guillermo del Toro) sneaking around and trying to remain undetected, seemingly focused on something with great purpose. It turns out the man is an assassin of monsters, taking down a multi-eyed dragon in Chinatown during what appears to be a highly festive celebration of the Chinese New Year. Naturally, Aurora gets the idea to send over an envelope of money, hiring him to kill the monster under her bed. The neighbor (who is amusingly always being corrected for pronouncing Aurora as “Erora”) insists that he doesn’t kill monsters. Meanwhile, Aurora assures him she knows what she saw.

Working with his handler, Laverne (Sigourney Weaver), the neighboring assassin can deduce that whoever killed Aurora’s parents got the wrong apartment number and had meant to kill him. Much more cold-blooded and straight to the point, she also encourages him to get rid of the girl since she knows his face. However, this violent hitman also has a soft spot and takes it upon himself to inquire into the girl’s life and to offer protection, feeling responsible for the death of her parents.

The film also works so well as a two-hander that it can be occasionally frustrating, and it doesn’t quite work whenever the story incorporates smaller supporting players into the mix (these scenes also come across as padding to fill time). There also isn’t much concern about fleshing out this assassination world or the types of clients the neighbor is generally tasked with taking out.

By the time another group of hitmen, led by underappreciated character actor David Dastmalchian, enters the picture, Bryan Fuller is ready to fully merge reality and fantasy into an exciting piece of cleanly shot, wondrous action. Dust Bunny relies heavily on its central metaphor but is elevated by the charm of its lead performances and their interplay. Sure, there isn’t much here regarding depth, but that’s more than made up for with the imagination on hand.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder