The Round-Up is a collection of capsule reviews for new releases that filled up my notebook but never got a full dive. Noteworthy recaps of 2019 moviegoing begin now…

Us (Jordan Peele)

Us may indeed qualify as a sophomore slump, but it’s one from a smart filmmaker upping his craft. Viscerally freakier than Get Out but less fully-fleshed, this spooky allegory for materialism makes you accrue at least a little heart for both the consumers and their “evil” twins. It’s about class, certainly, and it’s shrewdly about race insofar as class makes race less of an issue. The problem is how it trips over its mythology. The demented details of Get Out all gloriously added up; here, you get a twist that oscillates between making kind-of sense and no sense at all the harder you think about it. Part of me wants to feel cheated at any sucker punch that raises more questions than it answers. Another part of me knows that any movie that can sustain this balance for two hours—humor and frights, unpretentious genre kicks and on-target satire—is a genuine tonic. Sobering sidenote: it’s currently the only film in the top 10 grossers of 2019 that isn’t a sequel, a comic book adaptation, or a Disney live-action remake.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Transit (Christian Petzold)

A risky, daft, and ultimately rewarding concept: the script for a World War II thriller transposed to our own not-too-distant present, allowing old-fashioned story tropes, 21st century politics, incipient fascism, and narrative incongruity to nag away at you. The plot—about escaping Europe as stormtroopers descend, needing letters of transit, and choosing between romantic love and greater principles—finds its most obvious parallel in Casablanca. But doing it as a period piece would have a sense of removal, no matter how urgent the subtext. In telling this type of story straight in what is emphatically not a period setting, nor a logical 2019, Petzold’s film reconstitutes a vein of cinematic myth into a modern faceless anxiety. (When two people walk through the background of one scene, you wonder if they’re extras in a movie about the coming Terror, or simply a couple that happened to be passing by during the shoot). As always, Petzold is a solid storyteller. His weakness, as in his last film Phoenix, is formal plainness. The dystopia-is-now spirit of Transit cries out for a more uncanny treatment. Godard visited Alphaville with less.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

The Dead Don’t Die (Jim Jarmusch)

Presaged by a midnight movie trailer with the easiest jokes of Jim Jarmusch’s career, this all-star zombie parody shambled into the summer under the question of whether it would actually be as fun or as shallow as advertised. The answer, happily, is “sort of” to the former because “no” to the latter. Its po-mo goofs are indeed too easy, not to mention protracted, and like a good hipster it comes with a willfully half-assed posture to undercut how it has serious ideas on its mind. But the ideas are there, and even when it goes for laughs, its vision of apocalypse Americana isn’t so easily brushed off. In this context, the indulgences and indie comedy readymades—deadpan reactions, pop culture expertise, celebrity meta gags—register as paralysis in the face of rapid decay. “This isn’t going to end well” goes the movie’s dry refrain, as narrative threads keep getting killed off before they can go anywhere. Well before the end, it’s stopped feeling like a joke.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley)

Toy Story 4 would have to do a lot to justify its existence after the perfect finality of Toy Story 3, and if it doesn’t, it’s at least a fun, lively, sufficiently thoughtful use of two hours. There’s something poetic as well as merchandisable in its view of mundane objects animated by emotional fetishism. And this time around, the franchise’s running metaphor of facing up to change feels aimed at adult issues more than children’s. But fatigue, dispersion, and dramatic wonkiness have set in when the new finality is both the series’ most drastic and its least convincing. Not that you can fully trust them to stick to finality, now or ever.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Greta (Neil Jordan)

Guilty pleasure? If your reason for doubling back and renting a movie is to see Isabelle Huppert as a psychotic manipulative bitch-queen, you have nothing to feel guilty about. What’s guilty is psychodrama with such laziness towards both psychology and drama: too bland to be camp, too silly to be anything else, and utterly reliant on hack thriller stings. Porting Madame Huppert’s appeal to the American multiplex is a nobly fiendish idea, but she seems shockingly adrift in a role tailor-made for her. But then, so does everyone else. And the line “I’m like chewing gum” is the definitely least spine-tingling stalker threat in many a moon.

✬✩✩✩✩

*****

Domino (Brian De Palma)

A test: how many virtues can a movie lack and still have auteurism draw you in? Domino is by no means a successful film. In fact, of the twenty-plus De Palma films I’ve seen, I’d venture this is his worst. The cast looks undirected. The leads need more charisma. The story has holes punched out. The geopolitical context feels tacky. And the staging can be awkward, sluggish, or downright careless, which is odd, because even when he’s not winning over critics with tastefulness or coherence, De Palma can usually be relied on for brilliantly orchestrated set-pieces. But if it doesn’t deserve blanket defense from the faithful, it doesn’t deserve knives out either—and certainly not any of the despondent cinephiles wishing for retirement. Instead, look at the De Palma staples and the way they’ve shifted in the 21st century: the technocratic voyeurism, the games with an audience’s sympathy, and the reawakened leftist concerns of an unreconstructed baby-boomer. After a troubled production, Domino essentially went straight to video, and I can’t imagine that the original cut, reportedly about an hour longer, would fix it. But I’ve returned to it in my mind a lot more than a great many more polished and sensible new releases. Which means I failed the test—or passed, as the case may be.

✬✬✩✩✩

*****

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)

A wealth of potential meaning(s) here, in spite of the shambling structure. It makes sense that Tarantino’s latest spawned a hot summer’s worth of hot takes, since it’s nothing if not two hours and forty minutes of thinkpiece material; you could say “problematic”, “tender”, “reactionary”, “indulgent”, “self-aware”, or “but then again…” depending on what you focus on and for how long. In addition to a western about westerns and a nostalgia piece about nostalgia, it’s an attempt to answer a question: how do you do a love letter to a town and an industry with so much to be cynical about? The film’s details are emotionally attuned to what Hollywood gives and takes from its inhabitants, what it offers its fans and requires them to believe. The mode may mutate. John Wayne will give way to Clint Eastwood. Movies like Valley of the Dolls will fall into style and then out of it. Innumerable bits of pop arcana will be forgotten by everyone except insiders and obsessives. But Hollywood will always be here, beautiful and ugly. Did Tarantino grow up? Never. But even people who don’t grow up can’t help but grow old.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****