In the same year that Apple TV’s series The Studio (2025) took a scalpel to modern-day Hollywood – a Hollywood beset by pandemics, wildfires, union action, sparring tech barons, punitive politicians, and the creeping, existential threat of artificial intelligence – here comes Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, along with its hero Jay Kelly (George Clooney). Both film and protagonist are handsome, genial, and seemingly apolitical – throwbacks to a different, simpler, no doubt more naïve time.

Ever since he sauntered onto our TV screens in ER, Clooney has been painted as the last in a long line of great leading men à la Brando and Cooper and Gable and Grant, even when his filmography has failed to live up to the same calibre. He has since embraced the role of a man out of time, a silver fox sipping Nespresso on his Lake Como balcony, while his own directorial efforts have been blinkered by a slavish devotion to mid-century American nostalgia.