Noah Baumbach
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In the light of a Tuscan summer, he looks like Marcello Mastroianni if Federico Fellini had shot 8½ in color.
The shadow of “8½” looms large over Noah Baumbach’s tale of an actor looking back at his life and regretting choices he’s made, but “Jay Kelly” has little of the resonance and imagination of Fellini’s masterpiece.
In a way, this is Clooney’s 8½.
The flashbacks call to mind Bob Fosse’s self-critiques in All That Jazz, or Federico Fellini analyzing his own romantic buffoonery and artistic impotence in 8½.
…here one of Tinseltown’s golden boys gets his own 8½ moment, with Baumbach joining the league of filmmakers enamoured enough with the magic of movie making to get all metatextual about it.
After the lacklustre response to 2022’s White Noise, Baumbach returns to familiar territory here, crafting a coming-of-middle-age comic drama influenced by Fellini’s 8½.
“Sentimental Value” is more realistic and nuanced than the glossy “Jay Kelly” (2025) or primal pre-Raphaelite “Hamnet” (2025) while somehow being more optimistic.
A treacly character study of a movie star facing up to his status as an absent father due to spending most of his daughters’ lives on a film set (Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly) feels of a piece with a more tragic tale of art and family like Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet…
Along with “Sentimental Value” (2025) and “Hamnet” (2025), “Jay Kelly” tries to cultivate a film about a father wanting to retain his status as a priority…
Baumbach’s latest is made even worse if and when you finally watch Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, which not only handles the film industry and being actor better than Jay Kelly, but also in handling the dysfunctional relationship between a man and his two adult daughters, who he mostly ignored to focus on his career.
Recent films, from last year’s A Different Man to this year’s Sentimental Value and Is This Thing On?, have all pondered similar questions.
There are times when you can see this fitting easier into an foreign/arthouse vibe (and, from what I’ve heard, this year’s Sentimental Value is that movie, although I have yet to see it)…
Stardust Memories (1980)
Directed by Woody Allen
influenced Jay Kelly (2025), Frances Ha (2013)
Themes
What these films, and other noteworthy examples like Stardust Memories and Pain and Glory, have in common is the sincerity and honesty that lies beneath the fiction, taken from real emotions and experiences.
…it comes across as even less insightful a tribute to Fellini than Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories.”
Baumbach has wandered into the territory of 8½ and Stardust Memories and he gets a bit lost in the woods…
There are echoes, too, of some of Woody Allen’s more reflective comedies, for instance, 1980’s Stardust Memories, which has similar scenes of celebrities swarmed by adoring fans.
So Baumbach’s film pirouettes into territory already trodden by Fellini’s 81/2 and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories…
If this is in fact Baumbach’s Stardust Memories (and it is, complete with its own reference to Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2) then, when it’s all said and done, it needed a little more stardust to standout.
…but don’t expect “Sunset Boulevard,” “Tropic Thunder” or “Network.”
They can be comedic (Singin’ in the Rain, Day for Night), personal (The Fabelmans, 8/12), reflective (Sullivan’s Travels, Stardust Memories), acerbic (The Player, Sunset Boulevard)…
De ‘El crepúsculo de los dioses’ a la serie ‘The Studio’…
In Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, we witness the tragic fate of silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), whose career has faded due to the introduction of sound into motion pictures. She tries to exploit a young writer for a role that can revive her career–have the opportunity to shine in the medium’s evolution–but the Hollywood ruthless machine, obsessed with young faces, which serves as commodities until they are worthless, drives her to self-destruction and severe obsession.
…the aging actor trope played out in films like my personal favs – A Star is Born and Sunset Boulevard…
…it’s the comedic male equivalent of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950)…
Wild Strawberries (1957)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
influenced Jay Kelly (2025)
Visuals Themes Plot Characters
It's a thing we've seen in, like, Fellini or Wild Strawberries.
Thematically, Jay Kelly seems to be trying to maneuver between two great classics – Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Federico Fellini’s 8 ½.
Yes, it’s mildly evocative of the Ingmar Bergman classic Wild Strawberries, from 1957, but it’s strikingly similar to Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, released in the U.S. just a month ago.
These bits exploring the porousness between memory and reality recall Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, though their poignancy doesn’t make up for their clunky deployment.
Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly doesn’t have strawberries like Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. But it does have an aging man reflecting on his life as he travels to collect a lifetime achievement award.
At times, Jay seems like a Hollywood version of the egotistical professor played by Victor Sjöström in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries.
When the film overtly cribs from the style and storytelling devices of the French New Wave, it's not out of some bland, "I like the New Wave" impulse, but because that's an extremely useful touchstone for a story about insular young people (it does, however, hurt the film that its best moment is an out-of-nowhere direct copy of a scene from the much better neo-New Wave film Mauvais sang ).
Otherwise, Baumbach’s style could be called homage-happy: It’s classic Truffaut meets vintage Woody Allen meets Girls, with one direct lift—an exhilarating, freewheeling David Bowie-scored street dance—from Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang.
The film shows many influences, from Woody Allen (white titles on black backgrounds, New York City shot in glorious black and white) to Leos Carax (Gerwig dances through the streets to David Bowie's 'Modern Love,' just like Denis Lavant in "Mauvais Sang").
Frances’s celebratory sprint through Manhattan, her speeding steps giving way gradually to outright pirouettes, is a remake of an identical set piece in Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1986), only with the camera moving in the opposite direction.
One sprint lovingly lifts from Leos Carax’s delirious tracking-shot trot in 1986‘s Mauvais Sang, same-tuned to Bowie’s “Modern Love,” and there’s an obvious and joyful French fixation here, with music cues plucked from The 400 Blows and Contempt, among others (it’s wall-to-wall Georges Delerue, to the happy sigh of Francophiles everywhere), and a matte-gray palette piped in from the French New Wave.
Just like Denis Lavant in Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang.
Annie Hall (1977)
Directed by Woody Allen
influenced Frances Ha (2013), Marriage Story (2019), The Squid and the Whale (2005), Jay Kelly (2025)
Plot Visuals Themes
…como ocurría en ‘Fresas salvajes’ de Ingmar Bergman o en ‘Annie Hall’ de Woody Allen…
The movie is shot in black and white by Sam Levy, clearly as a homage to its chief influences: the French new wave (Georges Delerue's music for Truffaut's films is quoted on the soundtrack) and monochrome Woody Allen films such as Manhattan , Stardust Memories and Broadway Danny Rose , though it's obviously Annie Hall , progenitor of the freewheeling "relationship movie", that lies behind Frances Ha.
As a love letter from director to star, the delightful, funny, clever and wise "Frances Ha" surpasses even its most obvious inspiration, Woody Allen's "Annie Hall."
In a comic bit reminiscent of Annie Hall’s lobster scenes, Frances briefly tries to reenact some of the same games she played with Sophie with her new friend—with disastrous results.
Writing with Gerwig, Baumbach has created a fey, sneakily charming generational touchstone on a par with “Annie Hall” and his own Gen Y col-grad comedy “ Kicking and Screaming .”
The New York girl that Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) celebrates with such robust wit, speed and delight in Frances Ha doesn't have to be likened to Annie Hall.
After Hours (1985)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced Mistress America (2015)
Visuals Themes Plot
(Gerwig and Baumbach have acknowledged taking inspiration from Martin Scorsese's brilliant, similarly paced After Hours.)
Mistress America feels like something from 1986 or ’87, something that abuts Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, John Hughes and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours.
Baumbach and Gerwig have both noted in interviews that Mistress America is in part inspired by those 1980s comedies—like Something Wild and After Hours —in which a preppy square falls under the spell of an outrageous bon vivant.
Gerwig concurred: “Like Something Wild and After Hours and kind of like, being pulled into this crazy thing, and there’s a motorcycle.”
"Mistress America" is a different kind of channeling, straight through the screwball comedies of the 1980s, "After Hours" and "Something Wild," back to "Bringing Up Baby," where Katharine Hepburn sang "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" to a leopard while Cary Grant looked for the last bone (the intercostal clavicle) for his Brontosaurus skeleton.
The most obvious comparison to make, of course, is to Woody Allen’s black-and-white love-letter to New York Manhattan, but the inky, amorously lit cinematography also complements a score that heavily borrows from the films of the French New Wave–a fitting comparison since Frances Ha is more Stolen Kisses than Tiny Furniture, and one that gives the film a timeless feel that knowingly conflicts with its temporary themes.
Whether they deliberately wanted to evoke Woody Allen’s 1979 masterpiece Manhattan (my personal favourite Allen film) or not I’m not sure, but the film’s beguiling monochrome vision of New York – Manhattan and Brooklyn for the most part, plus it was nice to see Washington Heights get a piece of the pie – does just that.
But "Frances Ha's" black-and-white cinematography of the hipper parts of the Big Apple is more reminiscent of another smart big-city comedy: Woody Allen's New York valentine "Manhattan."
The Eurocinema soundtrack, the black-and-white street scenes and the neurotic short-term couplings evoke Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” but flibbertigibbet Frances represents a new generation of New Yorker.
Set in the heart of Big Apple bohemia, it's filmed in black and white in a knowing tribute to Woody Allen's Manhattan.
You may watch "Frances Ha" relating to little of it, or a lot of it, but this "road movie with apartments," as the director (shooting here in velvety black-and-white, recalling Woody Allen's "Manhattan" in its texture) so aptly put it, is informed by a buoyant, resilient spirit.
What do a tennis match, writing desks for “lefties,” A Tale of Two Cities, and Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore have in common?
(Its sparse decor includes a poster for director Jean Eustache's epic of sexual angst, "The Mother and the Whore.")
Jean-Luc aside, Baumbach's model here is arguably Maurice Pialat and, less arguably, Jean Eustache, whose seminal bleeding wound, The Mother and the Whore, gets a cinephilic shout-out -- harrowing domestic dissection, emotional rawness, the artist's exorcizing-feeding upon his own upheavals.
At times, Baumbach's film slips into self-appreciating shorthand, as when the camera notes the movie poster in Walt's bedroom, for The Mother and the Whore, or he runs off to find the diorama of eternal, gargantuan struggle in the Museum of Natural History that grants The Squid and the Whale its unsubtle title.
Shot in grainy 16mm and fluidly cut, The Squid and the Whale adheres to the purity of the best of the New Wave as embodied by The Mother and the Whore poster on Walt�s wall.
And only in his decision to adorn scenes' backgrounds with obvious signifying novels (Bernard reading Saul Bellow's The Victim) and movie posters (Walt's one-sheet for The Mother and the Whore) does Baumbach's general directorial tact and understatement falter, a somewhat surprising shortcoming considering his delicate employment of lyrical pop song accompaniment to underscore the tumultuous action.
Sullivan's Travels (1941)
Directed by Preston Sturges
influenced Jay Kelly (2025)
Themes Visuals Plot
…as it made me think at times of Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Preston Sturges’ sublime Sullivan’s Travels.
Con un poco del Fellini de 8 y medio, otro poco del Preston Sturgues de Los viajes de Sullivan y hasta dos gotas del Hitchcock de cualquiera de sus películas con un hombre que huye, el director compone la quintaesencia de las películas agradables, simpáticas, disfrutables y bastante bobas, todo sea dicho.
En esos momentos en que la película pretende ser Los viajes de Sullivan (ya quisiera el director de Historia de matrimonio tener el toque de Preston Sturges), el andamio se tambalea.
La huella de Sullivan’s Travels sobrevuela el film, pero solo como eco temático. En vez de un viaje físico y emocional que confronte al artista con su propia ignorancia, Baumbach parece replicar el gesto sin la convicción necesaria.
Jay Kelly’s attempt to reconnect with the people who watch his movies is akin to Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels…
Baumbach, a skilled neo-screwball farceur, pays extended homage to “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941), Preston Sturges’s comedy about a commercial Hollywood filmmaker who, in a fit of high-mindedness, seeks to rub elbows with the common man.
It is no mistake that the opening, The Player-esque oner on a movie set, which culminates in a demonstration of Kelly’s talents, is really a show-off move by the director.
…a dramedy that mixes the satirical industry insider aspects of The Player (1992)…
Its Robert Altman-esque opening is reminiscent of The Player, with its overlapping dialogue…
…pasando por títulos como ‘Cantando bajo la lluvia’ (Jay Kelly remite a Gene Kelly) o ‘The Player (El juego de Hollywood)’…
…a final day captured by Sandgren in a virtuoso single take that opens the movie — perhaps an homage to Robert Altman’s epic oner at the start of The Player…
…it’s a riff on the kind of oner that opens films like “The Player”…
Another example is All That Jazz, the semi-autobiographical musical by Bob Fosse, which utilizes the director’s own experiences to tell a story about the addictive nature of show business, mortality, and the struggle to cling to what’s slipping away – love, family, health, fame, and career.
The flashbacks call to mind Bob Fosse’s self-critiques in All That Jazz, or Federico Fellini analyzing his own romantic buffoonery and artistic impotence in 8½.
With a nod to such movies as 8½ and All That Jazz, a feeble script by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer touches on interesting conceits…
No hay realmente mucho espacio para lo metacinematográfico que sí podían exhibir referentes claros como ‘Fellini, ocho y medio’ o ‘All That Jazz (Empieza el espectáculo)’.
…and it wants to be George Clooney’s All That Jazz–a hagiography for the temple of film on the one hand, a self-lacerating reflection on the cost of stardom on the other…
Bob Fosse may have made a thinly disguised biography of his own life in 1979 with ALL THAT JAZZ, but at least he cast a different actor (Roy Scheider) to play him onscreen.
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017), The Squid and the Whale (2005)
Themes Plot
There are shades of The Royal Tenenbaums and Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Still Walking here, as well as Baumbach’s own The Squid and the Whale.
Told in chapters delineating the storyline of each sibling, Baumbach’s film has gentle echoes of earlier works such as The Royal Tenenbaums and Squid and the Whale.
It’s the kind of recommended viewing that might come up after watching “Flirting With Disaster” or “The Royal Tenenbaums” — in a world where either of those movies were available on the streaming service, that is.
Most specifically, it’s a reminder that Baumbach co-wrote the script to The Royal Tenenbaums.
Baumbach co-wrote a couple of films with Wes Anderson ( The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and T he Fantastic Mr. Fox ), and Meyerowitz is Baumbach’s The Royal Tenenbaums; an epic work that’s primarily about the havoc brought upon a New York-based family of adult children (one of them played by Ben Stiller) by their selfish, withholding father.
There are broader comparisons, too – to JD Salinger’s Glass stories, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (Baumbach worked on a pilot for HBO) and Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.
The closest comparison to Jay Kelly I could think of is the more anarchic films of Federico Fellini, such as La Dolce Vita and 8 ½, where the Italian director started to wrestle with his own success.
Never does the material reach the heights of truly great films about this kind of world and its crossroads, such as “The Great Beauty” or “La Dolce Vita.”
(Allen’s films are inspired by Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, from 1963, which shares a lot with the master Italian director’s La Dolce Vita, from three years earlier, which, in turn, informed Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, from 2013, though the latter two movies concern journalists, not performers.)
The story also lifts parts of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, about a tabloid journalist confronting the emptiness of his celebrity-centric life, and the same director’s 8½, about the midlife crisis of a self-indulgent filmmaker.
I couldn’t help but picture Marcello Mastroianni, taking stock of his life in Fellini’s 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita.
Films such as Cinema Paradiso and The Long Day Closes highlight the magic of filmmaking through the eyes of consumers seeking escapism.
Jay Kelly wants to be two things. It wants to be Cinema Paradiso, and it wants to be George Clooney’s All That Jazz–a hagiography for the temple of film on the one hand, a self-lacerating reflection on the cost of stardom on the other.
The soaring heights of Cinema Paradiso (1988) and Babylon (2022) fill the spectator’s mind as Jay realizes there are no re-does in life, unlike in the movies.
Its theme of ‘life reflected through cinema’ brings to mind Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, but not nearly as memorable.
References don’t end at Scenes from a Marriage though; a scene where the couple and their child lie in bed together, physically close but their gazes wandering and unmet, directly references a scene from Fanny and Alexander, suggesting the immense spiritual distance between characters.
“Marriage Story” is an emotionally lacerating experience, a nearly flawless elegy for a beautifully flawed couple, a broken-family classic to set beside “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Fanny and Alexander,” to name two films that Baumbach references visually here.
A glimpsed poster for Truffaut’s 1976 comedy Small Change suggests an inspiration for the picture’s skit-like structure.
But combined with the Small Change poster positioned conspicuously in one of the several New York flats that Frances crashes in throughout the film, it seems like Baumbach isn't only fetishizing various nouveau vagues of French cinema.
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Directed by Frank Capra
influenced Jay Kelly (2025)
Themes Plot Characters
…with the sincerity and heart of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)…
The reminiscing almost feels like It’s a Wonderful Life, except with the protagonist realizing he was actually kind of awful.
The film is a thinly veiled It’s a Wonderful Life.
Jay admits in one of several George Bailey–esque soliloquies…
Think It’s a Wonderful Life for the modern age, with poetic setups and payoffs that hit like a warm hug.
Lady Bird (2017)
Directed by Greta Gerwig
influenced by Frances Ha (2013), Marriage Story (2019), Mistress America (2015), Margot at the Wedding (2007), The Squid and the Whale (2005), While We're Young (2015)
Themes
In film after film, she’s let us see the social striving — posh, put-on accents, affected to-the-manner-born posing, feigned enthusiasm and self-promotion in every character (“Frances Ha,” “Mistress America”).
She co-authored her own star vehicle, “Frances Ha,” in 2012 with her longtime boyfriend and director Noah Baumbach, and the dialogue in “Lady Bird” is consistently and honestly funny and cliché-free.
In Frances Ha (2012), the first of two movies to date that Gerwig has co-written with her romantic partner, Noah Baumbach, who directed, she plays a twenty-seven-year-old struggling to, among other things, make it as a dancer in New York.
Gerwig, making her solo directing debut (she previously collaborated on the 2008 mumblecore movie Nights and Weekends with Joe Swanberg), injects Lady Bird with the kind of vivacious energy that suffused the films she co-wrote with the director Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha and Mistress America).
Undeniably reminiscent of Gerwig’s turn as a twentysomething wander in “Frances Ha,” the new movie may as well be its prequel.
Greta Gerwig, the one-time mumblecore starlet who wrote and directed the movie, has already established herself as a poet laureate of anxious youth, having co-authored and starred in Noah Baumbach’s bittersweet, screwball study of arrested development, Frances Ha .