Jennifer Lawrence’s mother of all performances in Die My Love, Jay Kelly an indulgent showcase

Die My Love (M18) 119 minutes, opens on Dec 18 ★★★★☆

The story: The relationship between passionate newly-weds Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) frays along with Grace’s mind after they relocate from New York to rural Montana and have a baby.

A current Golden Globe Best Actress nominee, Lawrence filmed the American motherhood psychodrama Die My Love while pregnant.

Maternity could only be a happier occasion for her than for Grace, who shoots a puppy, hurls herself through a glass door and belly crawls half-naked in high grass with butcher knife in hand.

Postpartum depression is a stigma no one talks about.

The condition remains unnamed in Scottish film-maker Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of the same-titled 2012 novel by Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz. Grace’s serrated psyche and exposed nerves are nonetheless fully felt through Lawrence, the Oscar-winning actress so ridiculously uninhibited, the extreme behaviour is often blackly comic.

Grace’s psychosis is exacerbated by her isolation in the farmhouse with her newborn, while Jackson is on the road for long stretches for work.

The couple used to have feral sex. Not anymore, not with each other: She suspects infidelity from the condoms she finds in his truck.

But Ramsay is uninterested in explaining her. The movie is an abstract expressionistic free fall committed to Grace’s disassociation, a challenging watch even for those acquainted with the director’s uncompromising indies We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) and Morvern Callar (2002).

The world blurs and swirls. There are visual symbolisms like a wildfire, and an affair with a mysterious biker (LaKeith Stanfield) who may be a product of her erotic imagination.

Pattinson’s sly underplaying of her ineffectual husband is easy to overlook.

And the wonderful Sissy Spacek is the well-meaning mother-in-law, who tells Grace it is just a phase. It is not.

Hot take: Lawrence is gobsmacking in the mother of all performances.

Jay Kelly (NC16) 133 minutes, available on Netflix ★★★☆☆

The story: Who better to play a Hollywood matinee idol of effortless charm than George Clooney? The fictional actor Jay Kelly heads to Italy for a lifetime achievement award, a trip that becomes a search for his identity.

The Netflix release Jay Kelly is an American comedy-drama on the myth of the celebrity, how the protagonist, now 60, has been so famously Jay Kelly the actor, he no longer knows who Jay Kelly is.

The pampered, self-absorbed multi-divorcee has a world of adoring fans, yet neither friends nor family.

A run-in with a former acting classmate (Billy Crudup) he once betrayed sends him on a journey of self-reflection. He confronts his past choices during a train ride across Tuscany, while crashing his daughter’s (Grace Edwards) European vacation in a belated attempt at bonding.

Along for the screwball adventure is Adam Sandler as his long-suffering manager Ron.

This is Sandler’s second Noah Baumbach movie after The Meyerowitz Stories (2017), an unusually rambling and sentimental one from the incisive American writer-director (Marriage Story, 2019). Beyond the truisms about ageing and regret, it is unclear what Baumbach wants to say by the time the meta-fiction ends.

Baumbach seems plain starstruck, understandably. Clooney is a smooth act, straddling the smarmy and the soulful with the support of a memorable ensemble cast that includes Riley Keough as another estranged daughter.

Sandler, in particular, has scored a Golden Globe Best Supporting Actor nomination – alongside Clooney’s Best Actor nod – for Ron’s touching but self-annihilating devotion to his narcissistic client. “We’re not to him what he is to us!” scolds Laura Dern as the exasperated publicist.

Hot take: This indulgent showcase for its silver fox leading man is pleasing enough.