Reviews of the Bosch

Marty Mauser is a good ping-pong player. His crippling delusion though is his belief he is the best in the world and that he is spiritually ordained for nothing more in life than to play ping-pong, as he openly expresses to two important women in his life, each of whom crave a little more ambition and foresight out of the determined and egotistical kid -an accurate term given his very immature read of the world and reticence to any kind of responsibility. Before going to the British Open in London, he robs at gunpoint the shoe store he works at for his uncle, for $700 he believes is owed him;  he even tells his co-worker to press charges and get him fired, confident he’ll be able to weather any consequences when he comes back a champion. But fate does not see eye to eye with Marty Supreme. Unlike his brother Benny, who released The Smashing Machine  a few months ago, Josh Safdie has had experience as a solo director, albeit only for his debut film The Pleasure of Being Robbed ...

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart. The very next day, you came back for my soul. That's when I learned you were a demon. Ah well. This year it saves me from tears -my emotionless husk can no longer produce them. Halfway through the 2020s, this decade has already given most others of the past century and a bit a run for their money in terms of how terrible they can be. And on the eve of one rotten year transitioning to another you can't help but take stock of that as you gaze into the nothingness of your own mind in deep meditation on the profound cruelty of the universe. Or maybe that's just me. But 2026. That is no picnic either. In fact, it makes 2025 look like an adorable labrador puppy rolling in a flowerbed. 2026 on the other hand is an ugly Cerberus with the complexion of James Gunn's Scrappy-Doo monster stomping all over a toxic waste spill while biting the heads off rodents. I've witnessed it from my vantage point in the demon's mausoleum (which actual...

Why have I now seen two fondly remembered Christmas movies with uncomfortable scenes of blackface in them? And why is one of them from the goddamn 1980s?? Like most of John Landis’s movies from this era, Trading Places has a handful of scenes and a few thematic threads that are frustrating or have aged poorly -unfortunate marks on a premise that in this case is actually very good and interesting. A satire of class and wealth that feels like a piece by Mark Twain adapted by Preston Sturges based around the singular concept of a rich man and a poor man swapping class status. Some form of it had been seen before but never in this precise manner or with this slickness, and it is perhaps the optimal example in American cinema. I wasn’t aware of how much influence it had on this year’s Good Fortune  for instance -which is basically the same plot but with an Angel and magical intervention thrown in (and maybe more direct consciousness of the reality of wealth disparity). For as interesti...

Given its prominence and popularity it is often forgotten that the genre of high fantasy -as in fantasy predominantly set in a fictitious magical world- has had very little representation on film that has been all that successful. Harry Potter  doesn’t really cut it -that franchise is entirely set across a secretive underworld existing within our ordinary one. Among various attempts, from adaptations to original projects to a long-awaited Dungeons & Dragons  film (that I’m sorry to remind its fans under-performed), Peter Jackson’s  Lord of the Rings  trilogy really stands alone in this respect …almost. Though it is rarely brought up now and appears largely forgotten outside of the fantasy film fandom and younger millennial nostalgia, there was one high fantasy movie to come out in the wake of the  Lord of the Rings to genuinely become a hit in its own right: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe  from 2005. Like  Lord of ...

The contextual title card at the beginning of The Secret Agent characterizes 1977 Brazil as a time of ‘mischief’. A mild word perhaps to use for a military dictatorship that monitored everyday lives and disappeared people without trial or explanation. A film like last year’s I’m Still Here -set about the same time- demonstrated that viscerally. But in the way that Kleber Mendoça Filho illustrates the authorities standing in for that regime on a micro level, it does appear to be the appropriate term. This is a movie that begins with officers elaborately investigating a car at a gas station, getting in it and looking through every nook and cranny, but are uninterested in the dead body lying a few feet away, a victim of gun violence earlier in the week, waiting to be disposed of. It is important to emphasize that the adherents to that system weren’t merely vile, but petty, corrupt, and idiotic. Mendoça Filho touched on that theme before through the villains of Bacurau , his wild revision...

It’s impossible to know if any part of the play  Hamlet , first staged around 1599, was in any way inspired by the death of William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet at the age of eleven in 1596. The creative process would not have been considered important enough to be on record for someone of Shakespeare’s relatively low stature. Likewise we don’t know a lot of the details of his marriage to Anne Hathaway or who she was in her life apart from Shakespeare. This historical ambiguity must be understood when attempting to characterize the lives of these people with little impression left behind but a name and an association with the most influential writer and dramatist in the English language. Licence must be taken, and not merely to fill in the gaps, but to relate an expression of these people as perceived by their artist. Chloe Zhao says as much about herself as she does Shakespeare, Anne, Hamnet, and how they are all intertwined by art. Zhao’s interpretation, in concert with Maggie O’Farr...