Noah Baumbach in LA

The series begins with The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017), starring Adam Sandler, who gives “the performance of his life,” as Bilge Ebiri saw it when he was writing for the Village Voice. Meyerowitz is “a self-consciously ambling comedy” that explores “the relationship between two very different brothers and their oddball father. Sandler is the unemployed, divorced layabout, Ben Stiller the high-powered accountant to the stars, and Dustin Hoffman is their failed-artist father. So, we’ve got Sandler plus Stiller plus Hoffman, and somehow the result is not a comic ham salad; Baumbach and his actors deserve all the credit in the world for keeping the shtickiness to a minimum . . . This movie is so well-observed, it’s scary.”

Sandler is up for a Gotham Award for his supporting performance in Jay Kelly, and the Gothams have already announced that this year’s Director Tribute will be going to Baumbach. George Clooney leads a packed cast as Jay Kelly, “the last of the great Hollywood stars,” as Ron (Sandler), his overworked manager, calls him. Writing about Jay Kelly for Film Comment, Molly Haskell finds that what’s “most interesting is the stark and increasingly awkward question that resounds with urgency . . . Can such an inherently unequal relationship, akin to master and slave, ever evolve into friendship? And how, if not, must that rankle?”

“Being Jay Kelly is a multi-man, round-the-clock job,” writes the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin. Jay, Ron, “his waspish publicist, Liz (Laura Dern), and numerous lower-rung entourage types must all regularly sacrifice valuable time with their own families to keep Jay’s career and image profitably afloat. Then suddenly, a few waves hit—there’s a spat with an old acting-class colleague (Billy Crudup); the death of a beloved former director (Jim Broadbent); the departure of his younger daughter (Grace Edwards) to Europe with friends—and this sleekly varnished vessel makes a sickening lurch.”

Cowritten by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer, who plays Jay’s hair and makeup artist, the film also offers Greta Gerwig as Ron’s wife, Riley Keough as Jay's eldest daughter, and Stacy Keach as Jay's elderly dad. But for the Los Angeles Times’ Josh Rottenberg, “it’s Crudup’s brief but blistering appearance that cuts the deepest.” Crudup “brings a mercurial intensity to a pivotal early scene that begins with warmth and ends in rage.”

“George Clooney in real life probably isn’t all that much like Jay Kelly,” writes Ebiri at Vulture, but the movie “has absorbed its actor’s vibe. It looks great, and it ambles along pleasantly, rarely veering too far into the dramatic or the emotional; moments of tension or insight are often defused with a laugh or some other odd narrative distraction. But by the end, it gets you anyway.”

Next Thursday brings Frances Ha (2013), starring and cowritten with Gerwig, and for playwright and filmmaker Annie Baker (Janet Planet), it’s “that rarest kind of new American movie: one that captures in painstaking detail the way young people talk today while simultaneously paying tribute to the past century of movie aesthetics and mythologies. That combination—of persuasive naturalism and historical fairy dust—is also romantic.”

Marriage Story (2019), nominated for six Oscars—supporting player Laura Dern won hers as well as a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a BAFTA—screens the following Thursday, November 20. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson star as Charlie, a New York theater director, and Nicole, an actor determined to return to Los Angeles to star in a television pilot. They set out to split up amicably, but then the lawyers are brought in. “Marriage Story, unlike so many other breakup movies, offers venom in drips and drops instead of drowning us in it,” wrote A. A. Dowd at the A.V. Club, “because it knows that no matter how far apart Charlie and Nicole drift, the feelings that first brought them together are still there.”

“I didn’t know exactly what I was writing at first, but I sat down with all these notes and ideas I’d collected over the years and knew I wanted to make something that would be evenhanded,” Baumbach told Hillary Weston in 2020. “It’s a challenge because you’re starting at the end. How do you invest people in a story that’s already over? What helped me do that was realizing that even though it’s the end of the marriage, it’s not the end of their story.”

The series wraps with a twentieth-anniversary screening of The Squid and the Whale, starring Jeff Daniels as a novelist determined to break through some day, Laura Linney as his third wife, and Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline as their two sons. “A killingly funny memory piece about the breakup of a family, this is also a real New York street movie, with some kind of kinship with the pre-Code city films made in Hollywood in the early 1930s,” wrote Kent Jones in 2016. “The emotional balance is constantly shifting, like a lifeboat for three with four people on it, in which everyone takes turns as stabilizing center, ballast, and excess baggage . . . Everyone is simultaneously everyone else’s refuge and monster.”