The Round-Up is a collection of capsule reviews for new releases that filled up my notebook but never got a full dive. For awards season, some heavy contenders and noteworthy films that’ll miss my year in review.

Belfast (Kenneth Branagh)

The city block of Branagh’s Belfast is not unlike Spike Lee’s Brooklyn: a theatrical stage that political violence might crash. But as a film, it’s also cutesy and irksomely mannered, as if it doesn’t trust any moment to land without an on-the-nose stylistic flourish. Branagh is comfortable working with stock figures and devices, and he demonstrates a certain faith that they have power for a reason. With familiarity, tidiness, and reassurance as his method of tribute, there’s little to distinguish this particular set of cherubic children, wise grandparents, schoolyard crushes, and nostalgic trips to the movies from any others you’ve seen, which is the film’s chief flaw but also part of its point. So it doesn’t capture memories in amber (a la Terence Davies) or politics merging with life’s theater (a la Lee). But you’d have to be more cynical than I not to be moved by any of it.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

Dune (Denis Villeneuve)

Visually astonishing, though I’d hasten to add that the hot-mess Lynch version had a hypnosis of its own, and a more vivid sense of character to boot. With an approach that’s half psychedelic, half YA Hunger Games, the new Dune is an improvement on the old by virtue of pure narrative coherence. But it only adds to the sense that Herbert’s mythos might still be too unwieldy for film adaptation. Villeneuve’s taste for atmospherics over dramatics makes the arc both glacial and capricious, a relentlessly slo-mo catalog of incidents whose structure—alternating rushed exposition with long sequences that get lost marveling at production design—is ironically the same trap Lynch fell into. But it deserves credit for uncommon ambition. And the unreconstructed geek in me (the one who spent middle school plowing through sci-fi paperbacks) wouldn’t dream of passing up a sequel.

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*****

CODA (Sian Heder)

A victory for representation is offset by how everything else, from its bland populism to a comically flamboyant choir teacher, is contrived, formulaic, sanitized, banal—hell, there’s no way to even describe CODA‘s flaws without using the language of cliche. It feels like neither the real world (not always a problem for a film) nor an imaginative vision of it (most certainly a problem). It’s more like anodyne proficiency. The kind you can half-pay attention to without missing anything.

✬✬✩✩✩

*****

Tick, Tick… Boom! (Lin-Manuel Miranda)

A musical for theater kids instead of cinephiles, and I’m fine with that. In fact, in a speed-run of 2021 Oscar contenders, Tick, Tick…Boom! is refreshing. It’s not as if it’s any less “cheesy”/”schmaltzy”/etc. than King Richard or Belfast. In fact, it may be more. But the musical idiom, and a palpable love of it, provide an energetic earnestness in which “you’ll laugh, you’ll cry” constructions signify more often than not as genuine expression. And Andrew Garfield is terrific.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

West Side Story (Steven Spielberg)

The Spielberg remake has obstacles to overcome: the shadow of the original, the question of urgency or necessity, and Ansel Elgort’s general air of obnoxious entitlement. But there are too many great shots and great cuts to list, and all of them (or most, anyway) serve a narrative function. The staging is clearly the work of a Hollywood master, with an emphasis on “Hollywood” and all its spectacle, colors, unironic emotions, and star-is-born narratives. The most satisfying needle it threads is being inherently nostalgic (even adding in the theme of a vanishing world) while being made from techniques that would be unimaginable thirty years ago, let alone sixty. It runs out of fuel short of greatness; that question of urgency/necessity continues to nag, as do a few decisions in the adaptation. But anyone with a starry-eyed view of why people go to “the movies” has the right to be concerned that it got its lunch eaten at the box office by the CGI ghost of Harold Ramis.

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*****

The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion)

A bit Rebecca, a lot Liberty Valance. As someone favorably disposed towards interrogations of nostalgia for “real men”, I like the ingredients. But narrative pieces seem to be missing, and its sense of the West is inconsistent; the whole thing is shot with the verisimilitude of a prestige period piece, but every time Benedict Cumberbatch says the name “Bronco Henry”, it sounds affected. “A story of the deepest human needs” is how it’s pitched by the For Your Consideration promo that keeps popping up in my news feed. And one of the worst things about being in LA during awards season is how it invites backlash that a film doesn’t deserve. So when it comes to “the deepest human needs”, or dissecting the masculine dynamics of westerns, I’m not sure The Power of the Dog‘s details or commentary can withstand a great film’s worth of scrutiny. But where it triumphs is as a slowed-down, artied-up potboiler—the kind where nasty psychodramatic tensions are going to surface in lurid ways and lead to a dead body. So maybe a better comparison is Duel in the Sun, another psychodrama on the range. And how Campion’s good taste compares to David O. Selznick’s bad taste is a debate I’d love to see in earnest and in full.

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*****

Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay)

A real test of any policy that it’s better for Hollywood directors to have too much ambition than too little. It lands a few salient points and laughs, and at the very least, we should all be happy in the year 2021 for any “studio movie” that a) feels like it was passionately willed into being, and b) became a cultural conversation piece. Its reception drew a line between those who found it a cathartic affirmation and those who found it insufferably smug, even if they aligned with it politically. Count me in the latter camp: this is a poor satire whose hyperactive surface barely disguises a lazy way of commenting on the world. And the careening editing rhythms that felt liberated in The Big Short are now formula, as rotely executed as shot-reverse-shot.

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*****