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George Clooney’s directing career has been one of both ecstasy and agony. His bold, respected spy dramedy debut (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) was immediately followed by the incredibly lauded (and incredibly great) period drama Good Night and Good Luck. What followed was a run of more mixed fare. One film was ambitious and flawed (The Midnight Sky), one overrated (The Ides of March), one undercooked (Leatherheads), and two really didn’t work. Then came The Tender Bar in 2021, a modest piece of work featuring nuanced performances from an impressive cast. It’s an old-fashioned picture starring Ben Affleck, who offers many old-fashioned, matinee idol charms, square jaw and all. Perhaps Clooney learned something about himself as a filmmaker with The Tender Bar: he may be at his best when breathing life into fact-based drama and not trying to be too cute about it.

Clooney’s back in...

The director lays on the strident messaging in this clunky film, all about the gutsy underdogs of the US rowing team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

George Clooney has been a charming and dapper Anglophile presence on the awards circuit this season while promoting the new movie he’s directed, some of which was shot not far from where he lives near Henley-on-Thames. So it’s sad to report that his film clunks harder than redwood. It is a stodgy and sententious varsity-sports underdog drama from the Depression era, a bit like his 1920s American football film Leatherheads, from 2008, but minus the comedy. Weirdly, it is as if this earnest but perfunctorily imagined film is always ordering us to feel nostalgic and sentimental about a time and place of which no one involved can have any real memory or feeling.

It tells the true story of how a gutsy crew of...