Reviews of the Bosch

There is a bleak irony over pretty much everything in  The Act of Killing director Joshua Oppenheimer’s narrative feature debut, The End . And perhaps that should go without saying given its title. But this is a movie that opens on a pretty, lilting song initiated by George MacKay that sounds like something out of Sondheim, its lyrics professing affirmations of contentment and hope in dark times, some poignancy for what is lost, and it is being sung by a family holed up in a bunker two decades after an apocalypse. That there can be sentiments like that expressed in a way so buoyantly is absurd given the context, and even more absurd the more we learn about this family. The joke is a very good one, and yet there’s not much laughing to be had in The End . It is indeed a movie set at The End, in the aftermath of a global climate catastrophe. How many survivors are left from it is unclear, but one wealthy family has managed to sequester themselves in an enormous and highly elabora...

Why is Robbie Williams an ape? It’s a confounding choice and I will give Better Man , the musical biopic directed by Michael Gracey on Williams’s career, credit for that. But what is the reasoning? In Williams’s own words -he narrates the film himself and is the voice of some of his own dialogue alongside Jonno Davies as his motion-capture stand-in- it’s because he always felt different, “less evolved”. And so the movie proceeds through that self-perception, his Planet of the Apes  appearance not tangible to anyone else. The real reason of course is likely just to differentiate the biopic formula, and between this, Pharrell Williams’s Lego documentary Piece by Piece , and A Complete Unknown  -distinct enough in approach, it’s good to see the message that conventional music biographies are stale has on some level broken through to the studios. Yet it does take more than a gimmick to stand out and Better Man  -while it does try in some other admirable respects- doesn’t suff...

The Wrong Trousers  is probably the best of those original Wallace & Gromit  short films that Aardman Animation made its name on in the early 1990s. It’s got some of the more famous imagery associated with the little British claymation brand, including those horrifying titular mechanical trousers and the silent blank-faced penguin supervillain Feathers McGraw. Aardman, being in a bit of a weird place right now where their former ubiquity has all but vanished and they are partnered with Netflix for projects that will never play in a theatre, it makes sense that they are incentivized to return to familiar territory. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl  is a direct sequel to The Wrong Trousers , which does limit the scope and accessibility of this second feature film significantly more than the first -the entirely standalone Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the  Were-Rabbit from  2005. But still, there is an irresistible charm to Aardman’s style and hu...

I’m much too young to say I grew up on The Andy Griffith Show , but I did watch it as a kid in occasional reruns and DVDs. It was a favourite of my dad’s at the age and I was curious by it, ultimately watching enough to understand and appreciate the show and its titular star. Andy Griffith was certainly a model of wholesomeness, engineered by the television show ,  and it informed his screen presence for decades following, up to his late career high point in Matlock  -both TV characters being symbols of old-fashioned American principles around justice. And yet probably his best performance relished in the direct opposite of those themes, coming three years before Sheriff Andy Taylor made his debut on screens around the world. A Face in the Crowd  is a 1957 movie by Elia Kazan that imagines the rise to entertainment stardom and political influence of a know-nothing country bumpkin through a particular brand of television charisma that he is able to harness and weaponize fo...

Ranabir Das’s cinematography in All We Imagine as Light  is nothing very spontaneous or vivid or creative, from a technical standpoint -and it is often in fact a bit dim in the dispassionate claustrophobia of its world; but there is an impenetrable radiance to it nonetheless. It’s somewhat mistifying for so humble a film. But then, the most unassuming movies can still often be the most beautiful. One of my favourite filmmakers is Yasujirō Ozu , who proved that statement better than anyone. And that spirit of Ozu, and those many greats who have followed in his footsteps, certainly permeates Payal Kapadia’s absorbing and intimate portrait of the lives of three working women in modern Mumbai. They are two nurses and a cook. The disciplined Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is efficient and organizational, and whose job involves teaching the younger nurses, including her roommate Anu (Divya Prabha), a more vivacious freer spirit. Anu is secretly in a relationship with Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), a...

The Sacred Fig, though aesthetically pretty, is known for its invasiveness. It will grow near and fast enough to another tree that its roots will overtake it like a weed, eventually suffocating the original tree. It is a part of the fig’s nature, along with its adaptability; and it’s no wonder that director Mohammad Rasoulof would liken it to the Iranian regime choking out the nation of Iran itself. His metaphor is certainly supported by firsthand experience -he has served prison time for critiquing that regime, and besides that has been arrested multiple times for crimes of “propaganda against the state”. For The Seed of the Sacred Fig , his latest movie, he has been sentenced to eight years -and is fleeing that sentence in exile in Germany.  The film, unsurprisingly, has been banned in Iran. They don’t want you to see this. And that should be reason enough to watch it, a movie that examines a crisis in modern Iran, both political and social, and as the title suggests points to so...