The Round-Up is a collection of capsule reviews for new releases that filled up my notebook but never got a full dive. As awards season comes to a close, here’s a speed run of some highlights from the last year that’ll miss my year in review.

Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund)

If laughter, not just vomit, lives in the gut, Östlund knows how to draw it out, and when his jokes are about male insecurity or the failure of well-intentioned people to connect, they’re meaningful too. As a commentator or provocateur, he can’t hold a candle to Wertmuller, let alone Bunuel. As a miniaturist gone maximal, he’s thin, and when he addresses politics by name, you doubt the class clown even cares. But he has a humanistic affection for bumblers who’d be natural bedfellows if not for sociopolitical barriers—a cockeyed character warmth that wouldn’t be on Wertmuller’s or Bunuel’s agenda. So If you see anyone praise this as a brilliantly satirical “takedown of the rich”, don’t believe them. Its value lies in its sense of thwarted romance.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

RRR (S.S. Rajamouli)

Tops most of Hollywood’s latest in pacing, twists, and flair, and it never exhausts itself—even at three hours, you never feel like you’ve seen it all. But as someone who considers irony a virus on contemporary movie viewership, I’m as leery as I am optimistic about its American film buff crossover appeal. Is it a sign of cine-hipsters accepting each unironic affect of a fundamentally unironic movie? Or more proof that it’s easier to pitch a film on its bonkers midnight movie/cult appeal than as something meant for serious reflection? Because if you reflect on RRR, you could get hurt. You’ll chiefly see a “foreign film” with as much fascistic numbness towards violence as anything we make in the West.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio (Guillermo Del Toro & Mark Gustafson)

Kids today have it easy: too many Minions, not enough troubling, potentially traumatizing children’s films. In that department, artistic principles explain why Del Toro’s retelling feels closer to the Disney original than Disney’s own remake did. It is a tad overstuffed, and the none-too-memorable songs get in the way. But when Del Toro assumes the role of an eternally young lapsed-Catholic pedagogue, he evokes just the right amount of skepticism towards authority. Kids have already started to figure out that some questions only have troubling answers. So I’m glad they have this to chew over.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Nope (Jordan Peele)

Peele runs the risk of being praised too much too soon, especially since his payoffs have been shakier since Get Out. But vision is vision and layers are layers, and he’s one of our few current hitmakers who’d design a movie good both for writing a thinkpiece about media exploitation and for grabbing friends/popcorn and anticipating the Big Reveal. The most glory Fry’s Electronics has gotten in years. Chris Kattan too.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Bodies Bodies Bodies (Halina Reijn)

I suspect this would make a good double bill with Scream: slasher films whose frights/laughs are rooted in the respective social maladies of Gen-X and Gen-Z. The latter’s scare me more. But although this clever exercise ultimately feels too ungrounded to fulfill its promise as a statement about intimacy and alienation, I’m tempted to round it up to 4 stars because it clocks in at ninety unwasted minutes and makes me glad I’m middle-aged. The whole cast is excellent.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

The Northman (Robert Eggers)

As someone eager for more American directors born after 1980 who might someday qualify for Valhalla, it hurts not to be all-in on Eggers. This one has more to say than The Lighthouse, and as he pursues ever greater size and scale, some sequences astound. But his obsessive detail toggles between real vision and humorless camp, and what it boils down to isn’t much deeper or more distinct than any number of revenge flicks. Including ones proud to be cheap.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

All Quiet on the Western Front (Edward Berger)

I dragged my feet until the Academy forced my hand because I doubted it’d be anything I hadn’t seen in a war movie before. It’s not; its main distinction is how it modulates the tone and intensity of earlier films to greet an audience of 2022. The battle scenes are very well-directed and incredibly frightening, and its perspective on saber-rattling summons an anxiety that belongs to our time as much as 1918. But when a scene isn’t battle or politics—when it’s “merely” human interest—it lapses into blander, generic repetitions whose level of insight into the arbitrary/absurd nature of war can’t sustain how long it’s drawn out. I do wonder if the Academy is jealous. 30 years ago, this is the sort of movie Hollywood would make itself.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Ryan Coogler)

Look at how the opening scene handles the death of Chadwick Boseman in one handheld long take, or how Coogler’s endings show at least a passing interest in the link between a comic book universe and the outside world, and you can’t argue there’s no filmmaking imagination in these movies. But you can argue that said imagination is tethered to a project that’s 75% pre-fab and has built-in disposability. The Black Panther movies, like Captain America, are better in this regard than the average Marvel property. But there’s not the urgency here to power 160 minutes. Even if fifteen of that is credits.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

EO (Jerzy Skolimowski)

It’s a bold director who invites comparisons to Au Hasard Balthazar, and Skolimowski certainly uses close-ups of his “star” in sentimental ways that were beneath Robert Bresson. But he adds absurdist humor and stridently replaces Bresson’s austerity with a flood of sensations. EO maintains, convincingly, that a rush of color and motion is what you’re gifted/saddled with the moment you’re kicked out into the world. Some passages are rapturous, others terrifying, and as it picks up the quality of a sustained 80-minute sequence, a case could be made for it as 2022’s best action film. Still, given its sparse, fatalistic narrative sensibility, it feels narrow. If you’re wondering how a movie about an ordinary donkey could possibly feel otherwise, that’s what Balthazar is for.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Corsage (Marie Kreutzer)

Beautification as bondage—the corset is a perfect metaphor. Maybe too perfect, since Corsage‘s arc (the weight of performative womanhood, and being discarded once you turn 40) feels so predetermined that the film’s repetitions equal or even outnumber its surprises. It accumulates interesting details, like early cinema and quack psychology, while its intentional anachronisms are more a distraction than a bold pastiche. But Krieps is indeed as exceptional as ever.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook)

Park’s latest surfs a wave of frenzy—hardly 10 seconds go by without an abrupt transition or a restless, vertiginous camera movement. But it never loses control, so its dramatic and tonal idiosyncrasies render old tropes thrillingly unpredictable: the relationship between a sap and a femme fatale is rarely this emotionally complex. Still, unlike Bong Joon-ho, I can’t trust Park for soul or commentary, more for style and twists. How many you can stand in a row is up to you.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Saint Omer (Alice Diop)

Roaring out of Venice comes a downbeat courtroom drama full of beguiling choices, including rendering the verdict irrelevant. A mother is on trial for infanticide, and claims that she was under the influence of sorcery. Is she crazy? Is it all a calculation, leveraging her “exotic” background for an insanity plea? Or is sorcery—or something like it—at work? There are certainly hints that reality might not be so tidy, and could even be a relative term. So the film’s achievement is to juggle rational discourse on race, gender, and class with some inevitable law of metaphysics acting upon the spectator. Its plea for humanization is simple. Its sense of an unseen world is not.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Holy Spider (Ali Abbasi)

There’s a kind of Cannes selection that gets branded in the US as an “art film” when its weapons of choice are the same as Hollywood’s: sensationalism; simplicity; bluntness; procedural economy; and a hero defined largely/solely by their skill, pluck, and perseverance. So it’s not bad. It’s dramatically engaging, moves fast, and has a comparatively interesting last act. But it plays almost every element with such a lack of subtlety that, no matter how much is based in fact, or how much the handheld camera signifies “realism!”, it all feels as transparently orchestrated as any piece of fiction.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller)

“What if I make no wish at all?” With that line, George Miller gets his hands on what has the potential to be the melancholy metaphor of the year. After all, is never pursuing your heart’s desire really better than briefly touching it before it all goes awry? But despite the dazzlement Miller brings to bear, I’m not sure it ever goes from an idea for a movie to a movie proper, chiefly because Tilda Swinton’s own arc feels so sidelined and thinly sketched. Still, it’s an all-too-rare exhibit of how our new CGI era can be used lyrically. If you can get someone to pay for it.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****