Six films into his career as a director, George Clooney is still a little indistinct as a filmmaker, though there are certain subjects – television, politics, the intersection of the two – to which he returns. What’s indistinct is the voice. He has struggled through a tall-tale biopic (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, 2003), a screwball comedy (Leatherheads, 2008), and a war caper (The Monuments Men, 2014) with a bounciness that has sometimes seemed a little too studied, too effortful. His best films to date, Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) and The Ides of March (2011), are pretty much straight dramas. They are tonally sure where the others, designed to amuse, are uncertain.

There is a certain obviousness to even the best of them. The Ides of March began life as a play titled Farragut North (after the Washington Metro station closest to D.C.'s cluster of think tanks and lobby groups), but was given its more portentous moniker at Clooney’s insistence. The clue is in the title of his latest, too – Suburbicon, in which the manicured decency of 1950s America is revealed as a sham. Having liberally reworked Charlie Kaufman’s Confessions script on that film, Clooney, along with long-time producing and writing partner Grant Heslov, has now retooled an old screenplay from the Coen brothers, who presumably felt it was too similar to Fargo to make themselves. You have to give Clooney points for running towards unflattering comparisons.