The Round-Up is a collection of capsule reviews for new releases that filled up my notebook but never got a full dive and will miss my year-in-review. This batch goes to 2023 festival releases that arrived for American audiences in 2024.

Hit Man (Richard Linklater)

Feels like something’s missing, but that something isn’t chemistry or a point. Linklater’s defining films tend to have little use for plot, certainly nothing like murder. So Hit Man‘s joy lies in the movie/life disconnect of its central casting: right away, Glen Powell comes on like a mutant hybrid, part Linklater type (shaggy, perceptively idle philosophy dork) and part…well, Glen Powell type (newly minted movie star, Top Gun hotshot, romancer of Sydney Sweeney, etc.). How it turns that identity crisis into a romantic metaphor is fun and truthful, if slight. So maybe what’s “missing” is that it stretches its fun and truth so thin that it often feels like it’s barely trying. But it gets laughs or raises alarm in a lot of the right places. And since Netflix scarcely went theatrical, it’ll be up to a future rep house to double-bill it with Charade.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

Green Border (Agnieszka Holland)

Visceral from the start—Holland and company’s camera nails the balance of chaos and control that social realists the world over aspire to. But it doesn’t become interesting until it starts sprouting multitudes, fragmenting in a way that’s as close to Paisan (for the better) as Babel (for the worse). It’s at its best when it sees a humanitarian disaster as a story no single person can claim; when it focuses too long on a Polish hero’s political conversion, it’s awfully tidy—and proof positive of how something that seems so “arthouse” in America might have its eye on the mainstream in its homeland. So in the name of fragmentation, note how it gives you two endings: the tidy, sentimental one, and a coda so bitterly ironic it jumps to life.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders)

There’s something inherently welcome today about the concept of everyday serenity as seen from one of the most thankless/anonymous jobs imaginable—a manifesto, of sorts, on public spaces, artistic sensibilities, post-COVID humility, and keeping your eyes open. It’s a sign of integrity that it never explicitly psychologizes its hero, but nonetheless locates happiness, pain, and protest in his lifestyle. But the encounters he has and the world Wenders builds around him feel cursory—Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, just as “minimal”, has much more abundance. Here, Wenders’ writing works less hard than his playlist. And even that feels designed to remind you of what you already know even so.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Phạm Thiên Ân)

In which the Cannes prize for Best First Film goes to a movie confronting the end of life. Something of that age gap is its essence: as its young hero walks, smokes, mopeds, and dreams his way through exquisite long takes, it occurs to me that this may be the first time I’ve seen such an earnest religious inquiry from someone of my generation, not Bresson’s, Tarkovsky’s, Malick’s, or Apichatpong’s. It borrows generously from such sources. But it understands them, and it has an experience to add. Whether director Pham Thien An becomes his own man, time will tell. But time is something he has. Skill, too.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

Perhaps no 2024 release gets more out of its title: whether the sentiment is bitter irony or humanist commitment can twist as you go, particularly since the structure (so attuned to the idea of “upstream” vs “downstream”) ensures that someone who’s a corporate stooge in one scene might become sympathetic in the next. So by the ending, its methodical eco-parable has accumulated the grandeur and control of a great film. But as for the ending, I’m in the camp that balks at it. It’s too coy on a literal level, too blunt on a metaphorical one, and such a gut-punch that it betrays the film’s subtlety. But see it.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****