Hit Man (2023 | Country | 113 minutes | Richard Linklater)

Richard Linklater serves up a very tasty slice of an incredibly loopy premise. Glen Powell gobbles it up and makes it work through the power of pure, unrelenting, leading man handsomeness. Nothing wrong with pairing a director who knows how to have a good time with an actor who’s ascending to movie star supernova. Here the daffy vaguely-true story meshes with an intensely charming performance into a delightful gumbo.

Even if it weren’t inspired by a real person’s actual story, perhaps most unbelievable is the casting of Powell as Gary Johnson (another “inspired by real life” figure; the source material for this rangy yarn was chronicled in 2001 in the Texas Monthly). The charismatic actor nevertheless squeezes into the role of an incredibly-nerdy Louisiana psychology professor like he was born for the part. A birdwatcher with a couple of cats and a wardrobe of knee-length jean shorts, he’s a contented loner who improbably moonlights for the New Orleans police force by building custom electronic gizmos for surveillance. The department’s main form of crimefighting seemingly involves an elite squad working out of a van to entrap citizens in the act of hiring contract killers to would-be murder-for-hires. You just have to roll with it, because the next improbable plot development is that they have to send in the electronics nerd to play the role of a hitman and he’s so good at it that he becomes their star impersonator.

Again, I can’t emphasize enough how dumb but also funny this is, particularly because of Powell’s commitment to his character’s fondness for theatrical disguises and the use of psychological profiling. As they let him run with this star performance, breaking up crimes before they occur entails a truly inordinate number of different costumes and personalities that riff on a hilarious array of crime movies. Real life and make believe get blurry for our dear Gary when a young wife contemplating murder as an alternative for divorce falls for one of his especially appealing alter-egos. It turns out that Gary likes this extremely sexy and mysterious version of himself a lot, too, and a series of ever unlikelier twists and troubles ensue as he finds himself juggling personalities to keep scoring dates. Linklater keeps it rolling, not quite lackadaisical, but with laughs, rangy charm, credible chemistry, and movie star power to make the improbabilities and big swings an incredibly fun hang.

Hit Man had its North American premiere at TIFF. Somehow it is still seeking US distribution.

The Holdovers (2023 | USA | 133 minutes | Alexander Payne)

Alexander Payne’s latest leans hard into 1970s nostalgia with a memory piece set at a New England boarding school. Working from a script by David Hemingson, the story is set during a chilly break when most residents have gone home for the holidays, three lonely souls find themselves abandoned on the drafty campus, each too prickly to have a clue how to keep each other warm.

Despite acting from behind a silly mustache, wandering eye, and ever-fussy demeanor Paul Giamatti transcends uptight caricature and finds pathos buried deep within an instructor whose entire life has been devoted to a teaching ancient history kids who openly despise him. As punishment for his strict grading policies as applied to an important donor’s son, he’s pitched to supervise the kids left behind by their parents over the long winter break. Like oh so many men, he thinks about the Roman Empire on a daily basis and takes inspiration from ancient society to ensure that his small band of young charges experience as little enjoyment as possible while under his watch.

Eigil Bryld’s soft cinematography of muted palettes and gentle washes gives a retro vibe as early days of their purgatory play out with monotony, cabin fever, indignities, minor conflicts, and a pervasively sad sense of abandonment. As one of the only other adults left on campus, Da’Vine Joy Randolph has a very nice turn as the school’s cook. While she takes care of the skeleton crew’s nutritional needs with a limited pantry, she’s also nursing the deep pain of her son’s recent death, preferring the relative safe isolation of the school’s kitchen rather than expose her still-raw emotional wounds with her own family. Her tremendous performance grounds the whole angst-ridden dramedy with compelling human presence.

Fortune eventually intervenes to put the focus on a core trio who navigate the holiday season on their own. As they find themselves awkward guests at townie parties or tourists flailing to make the best of a road trip to Boston, the film’s emotional repertoire deepens amid its droll humor. All of the “holdover” kids are brilliantly cast, but newcomer Dominic Sessa — cast from one of the boarding school drama departments where the project was filmed — who seizes the spotlight. Playing a kid one suspension away from military school whose mom left behind in favor of a honeymoon in St. Kitts, he’s the heart of the film who’s (naturally) the key to unlocking Giamatti’s prickly exterior. With this debut, he’s instantly earned himself a place in the upper echelons of the Alexander Payne sadboy canon.

The Holdovers had its International premiere at TIFF; it will be distributed by Focus Features later this year.

Next Goal Wins (2023 | USA | 103 minutes | Taika Waititi)

The long-delayed production was one of the splashiest announcements on the TIFF lineup and as a true underdog sports story held the promise of being a big crowd-pleaser for a festival that prizes its audience above all else. Sure, this story of a disgraced soccer coach exiled to help turn around the hapless American Samoa national soccer team has some cute moments and chuckles, but it falls flat over and over again.

Waititi puts himself into the movie as a goofy priest / narrator figure. Michael Fassbender is so miscast as the ornery coach that I spent most of the movie assuming he’d been spliced in after principal filming to replace Armie Hammer in the wake of his scandals. That role, a US Soccer executive, actually went to Will Arnett, but as reconstructed he and Elisabeth Moss have so little to do and are so extraneous to the plot that they might have been better excised entirely. With almost every character played for comic relief (mostly with cheap jokes about their simpleton natures), there’s no one to invest in. Kaimana (a fa’afafine or non-binary person) brings welcome dimensionality to represent Jaiyah Saelua, the first non-binary player to compete in a men’s FIFA World Cup qualifier, but is still stuck in a jokey script that doesn’t quite know how to handle this groundbreaking character and instead clumsily centers their dramatic arc around a coach’s journey to acceptance.

By the big, emotionally manipulative finale, the reaction in the theater suggested that the film worked for at least some of the audience, but I remained baffled. After a series of misfires, it may be time to concede that I have irreconcilably different sensibilities and interests from Taika Waititi. Watching this in a crowd of believers made me feel like I was from another planet.

World Premiere