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...