The Round-Up is a collection of capsule reviews for new releases that filled up my notebook but never got a full dive. This is where we came in.

Sword of Trust (Lynn Shelton)

No underdog indie was more conceptually promising for 2019: a warm comedy about our age of alternative facts, juggling the insane delusions of American life and the likable citizens who believe them. Thus we get the story of a heartland pawnshop owner, his shiftless employee, and a lesbian couple who decide to make a quick harmless buck off conspiracy theorists who listen to YouTube charlatans. Lynn Shelton has skills no cinephile should take for granted, including a hilarious, empathetic ear for the ways that people will talk in circles to hide their flaws before succumbing helplessly to honesty. This is the kind of comedy without punchlines, or even setups—just delicious friction. But the shagginess comes at a cost: Sword of Trust goes poof at exactly the point when it should be the strongest. If its destination is the heart of American delusion, it never gets there. Instead, it arrives in the realm of traditional sitcoms, with a twist and a resolution that are both tidy and palliative. And neither “tidy” nor “palliative” are 2019.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (Terry Gilliam)

Terry Gilliam’s famously cursed film was a fantasy twenty years ago, a tragic and promising “what if?” from a great director who had yet to make anything unworthy of the name. After a two-decade string of false starts and rewrites, the real thing arrived at Cannes to an unimpressed response. Amazon Studios abandoned it under litigious circumstances, and its ultimate release barely registered as a blip in American theaters. So if the hype and counterhype have cancelled each other out, you’re in the best state to glean what you can (and should) from this long-suffering passion project—especially since the Quixote we have is informed by years of frustration with the film industry. In fact, the film is so self-reflexive that it’s tempting to see its flaws as baked into its identity: an act of tilting at windmills full of doubt and lacking sense, but unwilling to concede. In truth, its flaws are much more mundane. The buddy chemistry doesn’t gel, the taste for excess is underfunded, the humor is inconsistent at best, and even by Gilliam standards, it lacks the narrative shape needed to turn its ballooning symbolism into catharsis rather than exhaustion. But its insistence on bringing chivalry into the film industry is not without resonance. And its most enchanting moments, which treat the real and the imagined as a game of three card monte, back up its case that part of tilting at windmills is treasuring the triumphs you can.

✬✬✩✩✩

*****

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot)

The latest find from A24 is visually busy and narratively choppy enough to feel like a string of music videos, just truncated and spliced together. The hook is there, but directorial tics are clogging its heart and taking the place of complete dramatic immediacy, which obscures the valuable things it has to say: first about the legacies of black culture and art, then about the dilemma when money is the only claim to a home and you don’t have any. It hurts to be lukewarm on any movie whose climactic line is as graceful and pained as “you don’t get to hate it unless you love it.” So in the interest of optimism, I’ll note that the last time I was lukewarm on a debut film about black bohemia in San Francisco, the director’s second film was Moonlight.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

Alita: Battle Angel (Robert Rodriguez)

In which Robert Rodriguez and James Cameron use dopey movie love to bridge the uncanny valley in a world where tech and organic matter have become intriguingly interchangeable. Does that conflation refer just to their world, or to ours? Take it as far as you like. The plot is a mess by the end, and sci-fi rules mean the same character can get not one, but two annoying death scenes. But the look and feel of this relatively humble tentpole are compelling. It recalls the days of Raimi’s Spiderman or Del Toro’s Hellboy, when blockbuster IP valued not just zazz but a visual personality.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

Honeyland (Tamara Kotevska & Ljubomir Stefanov)

The narrative that emerges steadily from this documentary’s impressionist footage is solid: a mini-epic about different ideas of modernity, tension between neighbors, and a principled stance towards living off the land. But the film’s implied insistence on an invisible camera—that is, that there isn’t a crew right there deciding how to frame it all—gives this trip to the edge of western civilization a cause for ambivalence. Ironically, the narrative of Honeyland feels more distant and self-consciously constructed than it might if the presence of filmmakers were openly embraced. Set it next to, say, Paris is Burning (a classic LGBT documentary whose restoration was a rep-house highlight of the summer), and you’ll see how much more gregarious a doc can be when it feels like the audience isn’t just watching someone else’s world, but truly being invited into it.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Apollo 11 (Todd Douglas Miller)

The highest grossing documentary of 2019 is an interesting construction of a different sort. Right from the opening shots, it looks and moves so much like a contemporary doc that it’s startling to know that it’s all footage from 50 years ago; even the B-roll of crowds takes on a crisp, uncanny quality of time travel. By using only a resurfaced trove of old video and audio (with a little animation to connect the dots), this retelling of the moon landing limits or at least changes its approach. It doesn’t have much in the way of context, subtext, suspense, or psychology. What it has is awe: images that can’t possibly be real, but are. At its best, it renews wonder in an achievement that subsequent generations, mine included, might see in a history book without feeling the magnitude. So if the film doesn’t really humanize its subjects, apart from marveling at the calm in their radio chatter, it’s because it insists that this particular non-fiction deserves to be mythic—and that mythic undertakings are most useful when they belong to a collective.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****