Let's not beat around the bush with what director Noah Baumbach is trying to achieve with Jay Kelly, it's a blatant love letter to George Clooney. The new Netflix movie is self-indulgent to the point of rubbing in it in our faces, and I'm as surprised as anyone else that I have no problem with that.

In fact, I think it's this indulgence that means the film can exist and emote in the way that it needs to. Clooney and the character he plays Kelly are basically one synonymous figure, gently poking fun at a sadness that runs through the veins of Hollywood. As they say, you need to be your own cheerleader, and look where that can get you.

Where I was expecting to be emotionally eviscerated by other movies at the London Film Festival (namely Hamnet, as every critic and their dog suggested), Jay Kelly delivered meditative heartbreak where its programmed rivals have failed to. There's nothing too overt or gauche happening to achieve this, merely a lot of sitting in the moment, thinking and processing.

I'd go as far as to say that Jay Kelly is the movie many of us need to see this year. I don't know what kind of permanent Mercury retrograde 2025 feels like it's in, but people are collectively going through it now more than ever. To be grounded is to bring us back to ourselves, and for Jay/George, the answers aren't quite what he'd hoped for.

Jay Kelly isn't just an ode to George Clooney, but regrettable choices

Let's set the scene: After filming his latest big picture, Jay Kelly thinks he wants out of the business. When a longtime mentor suddenly dies, he's brought face-to-face with things in his past that he'd rather forget. With his daughters making their own way in the world, Kelly impulsively decides to follow his youngest to Europe, throwing the lives of everyone around him into jeopardy.

Like him or loathe him, Clooney is the epitome of old-school Hollywood. He's got the voice, charm and physicality of peers gone by, and still never fails to make a group of people swoon at his feet at the age of 64. Is he the best actor around? No. Have all of his films been successful? Absolutely not. Yet he remains golden.

Kelly is exactly the same. By his own admission, he isn't the best actor and hasn't made the best decisions professionally or personally. This leaves him wondering if his 35-year career actually meant anything. Kelly's family life isn't much better, as he's now estranged from his eldest daughter, Jessica (Riley Keough), while his youngest, Daisy (Grace Edwards), is determined to find her own feet. As he soberly tells us, "my memories are all in movies. That's all they are, memories".

This is where Clooney and Kelly differ. While we've got no idea what goes on in Clooney's personal life (and nor should we), Kelly's is violently ripped apart. We follow his life through flashbacks of his youth, adulthood and recent past, all while present-day Kelly watches on in the moment. It's clear that introspection is never something he's considered, running through life like a bull in a China shop.

Truthfully, he's ruined just about everything without realizing. Alongside his daughters, friend and manager Ron (Adam Sandler) believes their relationship is purposeful while Kelly sees it as transactional, and publicist Liz (Laura Dern) is one crisis away from jumping ship. Kelly decides he doesn't really know who he is, and everyone feels the consequences.

But while that's a massive nuisance for literally everybody who has ever met Jay Kelly, it's helpful for us as a viewers. By examining his career, personal choices and parenting in painstaking detail, we have no choice but to be confronted with our own lives in the process. Can you truly have a work-life balance? Will our kids resent us for how much our careers pull us in other directions? Are we making the right decisions for ourselves and our loved ones?

As life likes to remind us, there are no conclusive answers for this. But watching Kelly struggle to comprehend his own accountability packs the ideal emotional punch. As Jay Kelly continues, we become one with him, laughing, crying and resolving his issues as if they are our own. When it comes down to it, they are, and Baumbach knows just how to connect us to that feeling.

Jay Kelly isn't just about Jay Kelly

As you might expect, Clooney is a duck to water when it comes to his performance, but he's not the only person behind the fractured man. Sandler returns to a comedy-drama balance as the long-suffering Ron, laying his heart on the line for it to get openly beaten by Kelly's self-delusion. It's the perfect blend of stern and soft, and we're rooting for him to stick up for the quality of life we know he deserves.

Liz doesn't suffer fools, which is the counter-balance needed to an industry intent on telling Kelly what he wants to hear. While I absolutely hated watching Jim Broadbent die for the 137465th time in a movie (playing Kelly's mentor Peter), Riley Keough is my standout supporting performance.

As a woman in a lot of pain, where she is in life and how she's choosing to live it has the most significance for understanding who Kelly is. She is desperate for her dad to listen to how she feels, yet direct about not wanting to be in his life on a permanent basis. It's a case of too little to late for Kelly, and an emotionally excruciating phone call scene hammers that point home.

Sure, Baumbach isn't doing anything exciting or fresh with his vision and direction, and there's a part of me that's annoyed with myself for loving a film about the most-documented genre of all time (men in Hollywood). But I loved how Jay Kelly left me examining my own life, reassessing what's going on around me and reminding me it takes a village to be a decent person – it's surprising how easy it is to forget self-reflection.

Jay Kelly is available on Netflix from December 5.

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As the biggest Conclaviac (that's a fan of director Edward Berger's movie Conclave) around, I was always seated for Berger's next movie before it had even been filmed. Now I've seen Ballad of a Small Player, it's clear that it was never going to live up to the hype.

Really, we're wrong to pit the new Netflix movie against Berger's previous work (which includes All Quiet on the Western Front), yet it's inevitable. Each of his last three projects exist in their own right, not sharing any characteristics outside of Berger's outstanding personal vision.

If you're coming to Ballad of a Small Player hoping for cinematography that will blow your mind, you're in the right place. If you're hoping Colin Farrell bares his acting soul in the portrait of a tortured gambler at war with his addiction, he charmingly delivers.

The downside is that the movie suffers from the classic problem of waning at the two-third mark – in a nutshell, the fatal moment where you're itching for things to wrap up and draw their conclusion, checking your watch in the process.

But besides this, I fell in love with Berger's end goal, flaws and all. While I wonder if being streamed on Netflix does the film's artistry a disservice, we should be thanking out lucky stars for such immediate access to thoughtful, quality craft

Ballad of a Small Player's visuals are the real star of the show

Macau is a city where, by Berger and his team's own admission, is unlike anywhere else in the world. A beast with two distinctly different identities, it's the perfect place to reflect big-time gambler Lord Doyle's (Farrell) inner demons, struggling to get himself out of a hole he makes deeper with every decision.

Without giving too much away, he's a man who owes a lot of people money (or has flat-out stolen it), spending anything he has left on the next game of Baccarat. When Cynthia Blithe (Tilda Swinton) begins to tail him for the life he's left behind, Doyle turns to Dao Ming (Fala Chen) in his hour of need. What follows is the ultimate test of his character.

Where there are big-scale locations like Macau and Hong Kong, there's big-scale vision. Doyle is accurately reflected as the flea in a circus of lights and power that he is, lost in an environment he's tricked himself into thinking he understands.

That's bad news for Doyle but excellent news for viewers, who'll be entranced by visuals that'll leave their eyes blaze in wonder, like a child seeing light for the first time. We see repetitions of Conclave's cinematic framing, meaning you can easily pause Ballad of a Small Player from time to time and find a freeze frame worthy of gallery installation.

In this respect, Berger is playful. Light plays against dark, overwhelm contrasts against stillness and chaos manifests under many different guises. As far as artistry is concerned, both he and the movie are at the top of their game.

Should Ballad of a Small Player have been picked up by Netflix?

Obviously, there are very few films in existence that are objectively flawless, and Ballad of a Small Player comes with its issues. Fans of the original 2014 novel of the same name might be horrified to realize quite a few key details have changed.

For example, Dao Ming is now directly tied to the Rainbow casino thanks to a switch in occupation, and Swinton's character has been entirely invented for the adaptation. Subjectively, I have a separate gripe here – a film without Swinton in every conceivable shot is one that doesn't have enough seasoning, offering up yet another chameleonic performance that stands uniquely on its own two feet.

But even if you're okay with the above, you'll likely feel the dreaded narrative lag that hits around the two-thirds mark. It was almost a given considering how much mental anguish Doyle puts himself though (which the storyline relies on), but we find ourselves frustrated with his lack of personal progress. It comes in the blink of an eye towards the end of the movie, making the journey from zero to hero unconvincingly rushed rather than thoughtfully mapped out.

Most importantly, though, Ballad of a Small Player being a Netflix release doesn't feel like the right fit, and that's for two reasons. The advantage of its stylistic visuals means it needs to be seen on the biggest screen possible, and I fear the average living room TV won't do the scale of what's been achieved true justice.

On top of this, the movie is going up against huge Netflix releases like Knives Out 3 and Frankenstein within weeks of each other. Out of all originals movies dropping on the streaming service, I think Ballad of a Small Player is the most likely to be glossed over (if for no other reason, purely because it's the smallest IP).

As Netflix hits its fall of back-to-back movie stride, my plea to you is to not overlook this one now that it's arrived. Granted, it's no Conclave, but what Ballad of a Small Player lacks in narrative nous it more than makes up for in cinematic scope, taking us to locations and circumstances we cannot access in reality.

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Wayward is the title you need to keep your eyes on most of all when looking at the line-up of everything new on Netflix in September 2025. Brought to us by Feel Good creator and comic Mae Martin, they've even bagged Toni Collette for her most explosive horror role since Ari Aster's Hereditary in 2022.

But this is just scratching the surface of why Wayward is so good. The new Netflix series tells the story of the small town of Tall Pines, Vermont, which is home to a school of delinquent teens that get shipped off to study under the watchful eye of Evelyn Wade (Collette). Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind) and Abbie (Sydney Topliffe) are two teens caught up in the school's mysteries, alongside cop Alex (Martin) and wife Laura (Sarah Gadon), who return to Laura's home town to settle down before the birth of their new baby.

Their two points of view converge over the course of the eight-episode run, giving us a multi-dimensional look at what it means to be a brainwashed youth incarcerated against your will. The town's decisions (and I won't spoil what these are) aim to rebuild Tall Pines from the ground up, but instead break down and fracture every part of its infrastructure. Not that this seems to matter, though as Evelyn's got her metaphorical hooks into almost everyone around her.

Between Alex, Abbie and Leila, it's up to them to get to the bottom of what's actually going on in Tall Pines. As a result, we're taken on a journey that resembles something between Twin Peaks and Stranger Things, and boy, is the outcome satisfying.

Of course Netflix's Wayward is brilliant, Mae Martin created it

Viewers should have known Wayward would be an instant addition to their watchlist the minute it was clear the series was coming from Mae Martin. Feel Good is still regarded as one of the greatest comedy-dramas to come out of the last decade, and not just by me. Even though veering into sci-fi supernatural territory isn't an expected direction for Martin, it almost doesn't matter.

Why? Good TV comes from getting the basics right: we're talking structure, characters, setting, as well as peaks and pits to hold the audiences attention. It's Martin's craft that's always elevated anything they've been a part of, even though their character Alex could be seen as another extension of their own personality. But we're rooting for Alex every step of the way, and that paves the way for some effortless LGBTQIA+ representation.

Instead of overtly stating that Martin's character is a trans man, the ensemble use he/him pronouns without hesitation, and when they fumble it feels authentic, rather than clumsily wedging inclusion in to tick a diversity box. It's incredibly refreshing and makes us buy into Alex's personal experiences on a much deeper level. If you're looking for someone more shouty about their sexuality, Leila is your girl, with her blossoming bisexuality proudly worn as only a naive teenager can.

Then there's Toni Collette. As one of the most talented actors that seems to be continuously unappreciated (especially by the Academy Awards), I hope viewers will tune in merely to see her shine (though I already know they will). She raises the game of everything and everyone around her when she signs onto the project, and there's no doubt that Wayward is what it is because of her. It's Evelyn's world and we're just living in it, making even the most skin-crawling of scenes enjoyable.

Stick with Wayward after episode 1 – I promise the payoff is worth it

For the most part, Wayward is well structured, holds its intrigue and has enough mystery wrapped in suspense to sustain us for the rest of the year. I'm a biased fan of anything to do with sketchy communes, strange towns and schools for dysfunctional children, but its subject matter is incredibly compelling even for the uninitiated. I should have felt as though I'd seen this play out 1000 times over (and better), but I came away from Wayward with a fresh perspective.

That said, there are a few minor downsides. With such a strange ensemble cast of characters in Tall Pines, not all of them get their backstories explained outright, particularly those relating to Laura's past. Laura's own journey has an ironic symbiosis with Evelyn's and it would have been helpful to see more of how she actually functioned in her alma mater.

Looking back, episode 1 was the biggest stumbling block, and that's not helpful when it's the make-or-break point of a viewer deciding if they'll stick or split to something else in Netflix's expansive back catalog. It's worth point out that all events that occur in Wayward are happening in 2003 rather than being split across different points in time, with it initially unclear how Abbie and Leila's story will cross paths with Alex and Laura's. It gets there pretty quickly after in episode 2, but the first 40 minutes require a bit of patience and push-through.

But these are small prices to pay for an ultimately satisfying and well-rounded eight-parter. Touching on themes of identity, motherhood, loss, community and trust, anybody who loves unpicking the crux of a story will be fed well-timed mouthfuls at every turn. There's an interesting feeling of pride that comes with working out the subtext of something, and that's a uniquely enjoyable experience in Wayward. Tall Pines has a lot of its own lore, both directly through the phases of the school, and hidden in plain sight among its residents.

If you want my advice: invest your time, trust nobody, and hope to God that you don't get selected for The Leap.

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