2025 Was the Year of the Movie Dad

Near the end of Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, the eponymous aging A-lister (George Clooney) finds himself alone in the woods on the phone with his eldest daughter. Jay has spent his life chasing professional success and stardom at the expense of building meaningful relationships with his children. Now, on the eve of attending a retrospective of his own career, he’s reckoning with his choices, trying to rationalize and justify his celebrity, his career, his movies, and what it all cost him. “I was young and I wanted something very badly, and I was afraid if I took my eye off of it, I couldn’t have it,” he tells her. “It was supposed to be temporary.”