Reviews of the Bosch

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Julian Schnabel’s Bizarre Epic Fails to Meet Dante’s Peak

I wonder how familiar Julian Schnabel is with Sunday in the Park with George . He’s a New Yorker and an artist so the chances I think are pretty high. It is one of Stephen Sondheim’s perhaps underrated musicals but a favourite of mine and just about everyone else who has seen it. It is about a painter, Georges Seurat, and his obsession with finishing his great masterpiece while also about a cynical modern descendant reckoning with that work. It is a very compelling premise that invites new consideration of not only the legacy of an artist but an interrogation of artistry itself. And Schnabel is certainly interested in those themes, having explored them in his two movies about complicated artists, Basquiat and At Eternity’s Gate . In the Hand of Dante is not like those films. Really, it’s not like any film, at least in the details. But it does feel like a culmination of sorts for Schnabel, who has been working on it in some capacity or another for fifteen years -since it was being dev...

Back to the Feature: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a very gay play. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , the 1958 movie adaptation by Richard Brooks tries the best it can not to be that. And yet… the gay text has a way of seeping through. In some of the context and material, there’s no way that it couldn’t. Not that it assuaged Williams very much, a gay man himself, who hated this adaptation of arguably his second most famous play in spite of its other aspects that remain loyal -such as its staging and a few of its cast members. But it was indisputably toned down in spite of what material it kept, and you wonder if it wouldn’t have been had it been made even just a few years later -this being very much one of the last movies notably touched by the Hays Code, in some respects. Certainly one might guess the censors were a touch prickled by one of the movie's signature selling points: the sex appeal of Elizabeth Taylor, emphasized in the film poster and promotional stills. It made for an enduring ima...

What Did We Learn on the Show Tonight: Why The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson was Special

For the first time that I can remember, there is no late night talk show on CBS. With the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert , an era has come to an end –not just the existence of the Late Show brand, which began in 1993 with David Letterman, but the era of competing talk shows itself. For a couple decades there, the talk show format was strong enough that it could support several variations with distinctions based on the character and personality of its host and their writers. But a few years back James Corden’s incarnation of The Late Late Show ended and CBS chose not to continue the franchise (leaving Late Night with Seth Meyers unopposed in its timeslot). And now that they’ve forced the end of The Late Show –the most popular of the recent talk show iterations- with Jimmy Kimmel Live also likely to wrap up in the near future, NBC’s pair of shows will be the only ones standing –as they had been in the 1980s though without anywhere near the cultural footprint...

The Emotional Bluntness and Naivety of Voicemails for Isabelle

In the 1993 Nora Ephron movie Sleepless in Seattle , there is a rather cheeky scene in which Meg Ryan cries while watching An Affair to Remember -the film which Sleepless in Seattle is a loose remake of. Likewise in Leah McKendrick’s Voicemails for Isabelle there are a handful of conscious references made towards Meg Ryan by a protagonist comparing herself to one of Ryan’s rom-com characters -Tom Hanks is also name-dropped. This thematic quote is not accidental. McKendrick’s movie very much endeavours to be a modern take on a Nora Ephron rom-com. In the vein of Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail it incorporates a modern messaging plot device as a means of bringing together its romantic leads, one taking the initiative from a place of anonymity only for the truth to inevitably come out, yet their romantic connection withstanding the situation regardless. One of those classic rom-com premises that only happen in the movies. Of course, for several reasons, McKendric...

A Narrow Sketch of a Dark Robin Hood

The Death of Robin Hood is one of those chapters of the Robin Hood mythos I remember most prominently. An older Robin arrives at a priory, injured or frail, an accident with bloodletting results in him slowly dying -in his last action, perhaps with the help of a loyal Little John, he fires an arrow out a window requesting to be buried where it lands and succumbing the moment it leaves his bow. The tale, which originates in a ballad from the 17 th century, doesn’t often show up in Robin Hood movies for its bleakness (an exception being Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian from 1976), but Michael Sarnoski is very much attracted to that bleakness. In fact, he builds it out. His movie, straightly called The Death of Robin Hood , subverts heavily the romanticism of the Robin Hood legend about as far as it has yet been taken. We’ve seen dark takes on Robin Hood, but none so grim as this in which the righteous reputation of the classical outlaw is suggested to have been a complete fiction,...

System Update Available: Toy Story Comes for Tech Time

What even is a toy in 2026? It used to be that there was a very clear distinction between toys and other kinds of entertainments for kids, but that has gotten much more blurred in the last couple decades, especially in the era of widespread digital technology. Toys still have their function of course and the toy industry still flourishes, but it seems kids are being introduced to devices like smartphones and tablets earlier and earlier, competing for their attention and entertainment with the more traditional “child’s playthings” as one cowboy once described them. Honestly, it is a very interesting theme to tackle with a Toy Story movie in this modern age -really the only theme to tackle that would be compelling for the franchise at this point, which has a pattern of exploring themes of adolescence, growing up, and even existentialism through the vantage point of plastic dolls and their relationships to the children who play with them. Every Toy Story movie after the first has to so...