Reviews of the Bosch

In the American Civil War, as the Union army pushed into Confederate territory, emancipating slaves along the way, General Tecumseh Sherman ordered that freed families be given plots of no more than forty acres and mules to aide in the farming. It was the first ever form of reparations offered to families of the enslaved, and naturally after the war the government of Andrew Johnson reneged on this and other promises -putting way more effort into southern reconstruction instead. ‘Forty acres and a mule’ has long held as a testament to that broken pact, to the chasm of trust between black people and the American government, and as a reminder that reparations for slavery have never come to fruition. So powerful it is as a statement that naturally Spike Lee named his production company after it. And it is also evoked by the title of 40 Acres , a Canadian movie that does let a part of that dream be realized, though against the most frightful of contexts. It is the feature debut of direc...

Philippine is not a name, it’s a game. A silly, juvenile game that teenage girls play and appears once in Adieu Philippine . It’s meaning is incredibly clear. “Farewell Philippine” is a farewell to adolescence. French cinemagoers in the early 1960s would perfectly understand. Jacques Rozier may be the most obscure filmmaker of the French New Wave. Compared to his contemporaries -Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, and Varda -he has received far less attention as a figure of the movement, perhaps in large part due to the fact his career was far less prolific. In a career dominated largely by shorts he made just five feature films, only one of which (arguably two) came from the era of the New Wave’s prime. But he was there at the  beginning - Adieu Philippine predating  the major works of Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette- and following the death of Godard he wound up being the last surviving associate of that movement, until passing himself just two years ago. Adieu Philippine may be his...

The Rosetta Stone of M3GAN 2.0  and ultimately everything that doesn’t work about it, is the reception largely in the online space to M3GAN . The 2023 Blumhouse film was basically designed to be an update of the Child’s Play  formula -the evil doll brought to life who goes on a killing spree, only this time with a lens of modern technological evolution and A.I. satire. But M3GAN the character, injected with a certain degree of savvy charisma in her dialogue and portrayed using a mixture of animatronic, CG effects, and a live performer -child dancer Amie Donald- that rendered her both entertainingly anthropomorphic and unnervingly uncanny, became a viral figure. Whether it was her retro dress and aesthetics, her sassy attitude when confronted, or that bizarre dance she does in the climax, she became a pretty immediate camp icon like the horror genre hasn’t seen in a long time. But it’s one thing to stumble into this kind of sensation accidentally, it’s another to try and engine...

F1 was made by much of the same team that made Top Gun: Maverick , and it could be argued the movie is a mere retread of that one. In fact, and with Jerry Bruckheimer serving as producer, I’m not convinced this movie wasn’t originally conceived as a direct Maverick -style lega-sequel for Days of Thunder , Bruckheimer, Tony Scott, and Tom Cruise’s lacklustre NASCAR follow-up to the original Top Gun . If that wasn’t the case, then it is certainly fascinating that the creative teams behind both fighter jet movies decided that a racing film was their natural next project. As these remixes of prior successes go, F1  is the better movie. A part of that may be down to director Joseph Kosinski knowing his lane well and pouring all his energy into making that as slick and impressive as possible. That lane of course being the high-octane action of the subject and the plain but strongly focused stakes and character tensions. All of it does of course feel highly reminiscent to Top Gun: Ma...

Nothing says summer like a middle-aged man waltzing around the neighbourhood in nothing but a bathing suit diving into backyard swimming pools and occasionally flirting with much younger women. There must have been something in the chlorine in the late 1960s, to have seen at least two movies, released a year apart and in different countries to centre thriller plots around private swimming pools in the heat of summer with characters who spend the bulk of the film unclothed. But where La Piscine , which came out in 1969 in France, is characterized by a dangerous eroticism in its crisp, sultry cinematography escalating its tensions to a fever pitch, its predecessor The Swimmer  is more picturesque and aesthetic in design, its brazenness rather delineating gradually from a place of high esteem and purpose to one of intense uncertainty and timidity. In cruder terms, La Piscine  is a film that rises to explosive climax, while The Swimmer  shrivels into impotence. Like getting o...

The movie landscape as we know it would not exist without Jaws . That is a statement without judgement, the popular status of  Jaws  as the original summer blockbuster may be used to critique the effect of its progeny as much as commend, but it is still a true fact that the movie industry and movie culture would be vastly different today and at any point in the last several decades were it not for this one shark movie that happened to capture the world by storm fifty years ago this month. The phenomenon of  Jaws though is often separate from the movie itself, which in spite of its records set for the time and outsize impact on the direction the movie business has pursued ever since, would have been a great movie regardless of these effects. And yet they do matter. They are the reason we are still talking about Jaws  five decades on, the reason why Steven Spielberg -who honestly assumed during its famously troubled production that it would be the last movie he would b...