The third of Netflix’s big four year-end Oscar contenders, Jay Kelly, has landed on the streaming service.

The first of these films, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, lived up to my expectations, and the second, Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams exceeded them. Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, though, is a disappointment.

The film has a catchy advertising line, “all my memories are movies”, but unfortunately what the film shows us are not good memories.

The latest film from the Marriage Story director plays like Federico Fellini’s 1983 masterpiece, 8½, albeit from the perspective of an American actor instead of an Italian director. The idea is clinched by the display of still photos of Loren and Mastroianni toward the end.

If you’re going to go for something that lofty, you had better have the goods. Baumbach doesn’t.

The film revolves a Hollywood star, played by George Clooney, who is being given a tribute by an Italian film society.

I remember Clooney, when he was a struggling actor living with his aunt, the great Rosemary Clooney, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His career didn’t really take off until the late 1990s but has been going strong ever since. Now, he’s a world-famous producer and director as well as an actor whose every move is reported in the press. Last year, he even made news by inserting himself into a presidential campaign. One thing he is not, though, is “the last movie star” as his character is referred to in the film. If he never made another movie, would anyone care?

The film clips from actual Clooney films shown in the overlong tribute at the end of Jay Kelly aren’t very interesting. I don’t think he’s turning down tributes in real life. I don’t think anyone cares enough about him to even offer to do one. The real last movie star was Paul Newman.

All that aside, there is nothing in the film that is new or compelling. Clooney is playing Clooney. Adam Sandler is playing a subdued version of himself as his hardworking manager and friend.

Billy Crudup, Patrick Wilson, and Stacy Keach, however, are quite marvelous in their extended cameos of respectively, the actor friend whose career he stole, the TV actor turned movie star who is also receiving a career tribute from an Italian film society, and Clooney’s sourpuss of a dad.

Of the women, only Riley Keough as Clooney’s eldest daughter seems like a real person. The rest of them, from Laura Dern as Clooney’s agent to Emily Mortimer as one of the numerous members of his entourage, who co-wrote the screenplay with Baumbach, are basically stick figures.

The best thing about the film is its cinematography, not its writing, directing, or acting.

Netflix’s fourth big year-end Oscar contender, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery starts streaming on Friday.

Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, now streaming on Peacock, is a major disappointment.

The latest film from the Call me by Your Name director is about a female Yale professor played by a stiff-lipped Julia Roberts who is put between a rock and a hard place when her star student Ayo Idiberi accuses Roberts’ colleague Andrew Garfield of rape preempting his bringing charges of plagiarism against her.

What sounds intriguing on paper is, however, a miserable thing to sit through.

The actors try but the characters they are playing are all insufferable. Set in academia, the film’s stars all use words in their everyday conversation rarely heard outside a classroom. Michael Stuhlbarg as Roberts’ psychiatrist-gourmet cook husband who plays loud music to drown out his humdrum surroundings is something out of a 1930s movie with Eric Blore in support of the lead actors.

The scene in which Andrew Garfield is accused of raping Ayo Ediberi is not shown, leaving it to the viewer to determine who is lying. Guadagnino doesn’t take sides, but his opening the film in the style of title credits from old Woody Allen movies seems to suggest that he’s on the guy’s side which is what gives the film its anti-feminist reputation.

The film’s coda, in which Roberts and Ediberi meet five years later, is bizarre. This thing is simply dreadful start to finish.

Newly released on Blu-ray by Sony Pictures Classics, Scarlett Johansson’s debut film as a director,
Eleanor the Great is quite a nice little movie. It may not be anything major, but it is nothing to be sneezed at either.

June Squibb is terrific in a role that should at least merit Oscar consideration for Best Actress for her seriocomic performance. The actress is playing her age, 94 at the time of filming, as a Jewish Bronx widow living in Florida with a roommate of the same age who is a Holocaust survivor. The roommate dies suddenly, and Squibb moves to Manhattan to live with her daughter where she wanders into a Jewish Community Center where the fun begins.

Squib’s character, not one to just sit there to observe or excuse herself and leave, enters the discussion by giving her roommate’s memories of the Holocaust as her own. Her little lie mushrooms into a bigger one and she is publicly ostracized before coming back stronger than ever as she makes her apologies.

The film ends on a somber note as Squibb recounts her roommate’s last words.

Warner Archive’s most recent Blu-ray releases include three comedies from Hollywood’s golden age that aren’t classics but are at least amusing. They are 1937’s It’s Love I’m After with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis emulating Broadway legends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne; 1940’s I Love You Again with William Powell and Myrna between The Thin Man films; and 1941’s The Bride Came C.O.D. with James Cagney and Bette Davis in their only film together, a sort of reworking of 1934’s Oscar winning It Happened One Night.

Happy viewing.