Reviews of the Bosch

For more than a decade now, the people of superhero movies have not mattered. Not the superheroes and villains -they are extraordinarily important- but the everyday people the heroes are at least theoretically there to protect. Apart from immediate family, friends, or love interests, civilians don’t factor at all into the modern superhero equation -even though they are a critical part of what makes superheroes work as a concept. And so, when the major first act action set-piece occurs in James Gunn’s Superman , involving the titular character along with a handful of other heroes fighting a kaiju monster in the middle of Metropolis, it is notable that the emphatic focus of this Man of Steel in contrast to his colleagues is on getting civilians out of harms way. He even stops to rescue a squirrel, he cares that deeply about all living things. That this is treated with astonishing controversy by some or with quaintness by others speaks to how far this movie genre has gotten from its first...

At least we’re (mostly) free of the mutants and locusts… The  Jurassic  franchise refuses to go extinct, even with all of the opportunities it has had. And really that seems to be because the public just likes dinosaurs so much, and this is the only series seemingly allowed to occupy that lucrative space. People will come to these movies simply for that gimmick, and maybe the dumber gimmick of mutant dinosaurs. And so even after Jurassic World: Dominion  tried to tie up its own little continuity, we are back to the dino island once again for Jurassic World: Rebirth . For this however, Universal chose a fairly back-to-basics approach, similar to the original set of Jurassic Park movies of dropping some characters off on a dinosaur island where they must try to survive. Granted, the Jurassic World  movies never completely strayed from this formula -refusing to realize the potential of that title- but they always stuck to it in concert with baffling and convoluted creat...

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...