Cary Grant. Gary Cooper. Jay Kelly. A story about a movie star having an existential moment. Not a crisis. Not a breakdown. A moment. Or a few, to be fair. Jay Kelly (George Clooney basically playing a version of himself) bails on his latest film to chase his daughter across Europe. He's accompanied by an entourage, including a hair and makeup artist (co-writer Mortimer), a publicist (Laura Dern), and Ron, his long-suffering manager (Sandler). Through backstory, we learn that Jay doesn’t have...

I love watching films by certain filmmakers because you know that, regardless of the story, they’ll be well-made. One of those is Kathryn Bigelow and her latest A House of Dynamite, written by Noah Oppenheim. And while the production is expectedly solid, we shall dive into the screenplay. When a lone intercontinental missile is headed toward the U.S., with 19 minutes to respond, we track 3 departments and how they deal with the response. The urgency is real. The script is structured so we see...

Each screenplay serves three masters: the story, the characters, and the writer (or filmmaker). And if all three are equally satisfied,...