You can call it playing a character “similar to himself” all you want, but George Clooney isn’t stretching all that much as a veteran actor regretting some of his choices in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly (C). To flee an incident likely to get him bad press, the protagonist and his longtime manager (Adam Sandler) step away to Europe, where there’s reflection on his legacy, a look back at his cinematic canon and a flurry of memories about choices he made related to his daughters (Riley Keough and Grace Edwards). Baumbach fills the film with insider elements about the movie business but fails to paint an intriguing central character. With not much interesting to see related to the titular character and the sidelining of an inciting incident, Sandler gets a few moments to shine as he laments whether he’s a friend or a cost center in a few sequences opposite Laura Dern as a similarly underappreciated publicist.  This meta narrative treads very little new themes and isn’t particularly insightful or funny.  There’s a moment during a film retrospective that was kind of embarrassing in its awards season thirst. This year alone, the film Sentimental Value is a far richer film on the gulf and intersections between art and humanity.