Reviews of the Bosch

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The Criterion Channel Presents: Metropolitan (1990)

If you were to guess based off the name Whit Stillman what kind of movie he would direct, you would probably come up with something approximating Metropolitan . Both he and his film feel like they would be most comfortable in the Edwardian era and the comedy of manners sensibilities of P.G. Wodehouse. He apparently did intend the film not to be set in the modern day, but didn’t have the budget enough to convincingly replicate a period setting. But of course his characters, barring just a couple, all feel ripped from another time and place -posh and aristocratic in a way I can’t imagine even the most egregious elites of the modern day trying to keep up. But then, that itself is a notable facet of the film. The movie is set in the midst of ‘debutante season’ on the Upper East Side of New York -which coincides with Christmas- and follows an outsiders view into the insular lives and traditions of a crew of wealthy young socialites. Due to a mix-up, an educated but middle-class Princeton st...

KPop Demon Hunters Slays through Musical Instinct and Visual Bombast

The culmination of some thirty years of a cultural exportation boom that has come to be known as the Korean Wave is KPop Demon Hunters . After all the ubiquity of KPop bands and K-dramas, Parasite winning at the Oscars, and Squid Game at the Emmys, Korean culture has so cemented itself internationally that Korea doesn’t even need to be involved anymore. KPop Demon Hunters is an American movie, produced by Sony Pictures Animation for Netflix, conceived and directed by Korean-Canadian Maggie Kang, and featuring a cast of American and Canadian actors and singers of the Korean diaspora (with the notable exception of Lee Byung-hun as the film’s primary villain). And yet despite a lack of production connection to South Korea, it has enjoyed as much if not more popularity than other products of the Korean Wave. A significant statement on how encompassing Korean cultural trends and aesthetics have become within other popular cultures worldwide. KPop Demon Hunters i...

Zootopia 2 Holds Back, Falls Into Pedestrian Pablum

The Disney that created Zootopia in 2016 is very different from the Disney that just produced its sequel in 2025. By Disney standards it’s not so long of a stretch ( The Rescuers Down Under came thirteen years after its predecessor by which point the audience for it had evaporated), but they feel a world apart. In 2016 Disney was still riding high off the resurgence Tangled and Frozen had given the studio -though shortly after it the studio entered a long creative slump it remains in the midst of, wherein it has been very hesitant to take a chance on a new idea. Zootopia 2 is the fourth animated sequel of the last seven years -and though it is on the heels of Moana 2 (and is likely to be at least a fraction as successful), there’s not much in it to turn the tides of Disney’s current rather lacklustre reputation on its animation front. Zootopia was always a bit of a gimmick idea to begin with, and the earlier movie went pretty far with that...

Rental Family is a Gentle though Discerning Work of Cultural Curiosity

It must be bizarre for people in Japan or Korea to see movies made about mundane aspects of society for them though filtered through an American lens that is astounded by them. The rental family is one of those concepts -a not uncommon service in Japan whereby actors are hired to play a friend or family member for a client for reasons ranging from social etiquette to companionship to a means of working through grief. And it is something that feels strange and even unethical to many a westerner, especially for those aspects that require deception or that interact with sex work outside the traditional purview of acting. To impose that moral judgement from a western perspective would be arrogant and condescending -as though we have any real high ground to stand on. That is why it is important that Rental Family , a movie basically designed to teach westerners about this thing, is directed by a Japanese filmmaker, whose own assessment of the service is thus unclouded by cultural bias. Hika...

Back to the Feature: Limelight (1952)

There is a notable twinkle in the eye of Charlie Chaplin that makes the ending shot of City Lights so emotionally iconic. That same twinkle reappears a few times in Limelight , made over twenty years later. If Chaplin’s career was in potential danger in 1931 as the silent film looked to be rapidly a thing of the past, it was by and large over by 1952. He’d made only a single misfire of a movie(in which he played a serial killer) in the twelve years since his last honest hit The Great Dictator , though it is possible a part of the setback had to do with allegations of Communist sympathies -though he was never fully blacklisted he was heavily boycotted -to the degree that Limelight , which came at the height of McCarthyism, never even played in Los Angeles. This is how it wound up being eligible for the Oscars a further two decades later in 1973, when it was at last rediscovered, reappraised, and released in that city. Chaplin was nominated for and won an Oscar for Best Original Sc...

Charlie Brown at the Movies: Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!!) (1980)

I’ve encountered few movie titles as mean as Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!!) . I suppose it’s fitting as it was the last Peanuts feature film for thirty-five years, and maybe at the time Schulz, Melendez, and Mendelsohn realized it. Because it is a very odd beast. Like the previous movie, it isn’t derived from any storyline written for the comic strip -instead drawn from a visit Schulz had taken to a French chateau where he had formerly been stationed during the war. Another very different kind of setting for a Peanuts story -I don’t think Charlie Brown had ever left the country before- but one that is at least a little more interesting than Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown , if it does ultimately not really lead anywhere. It starts off pretty great, with some atmospheric animation that shows a little how more technically skilled these movies had gotten, and in the ominous setting of a girl in a castle in the rain -it might not even be set contemporaneousl...