Reviews of the Bosch

To meet this anticipation, MGM, Though it is set against a grounded socio-economic background and real history, Glauber Rocha’s  Black God, White Devil  plays out like a mythic parable -or rather two mythic parables told back to back. Part of this may only resonate to those outside of Brazil -it presents an image of the country not often seen in the west, so used to it either being represented by its dense metropolises, coasts, and Amazonian jungles. But this film is set entirely in the arid hinterland environments of the Bahia region, experiencing a major drought during the 1940s. There is misery and desperation to this place, and lawlessness -it is the wild west (though more in the east of the country), which Rocha acknowledges in the manner of his presentation, but also as a form of commentary on the tenuous state of the nation at that time (and indeed the time that  he  made the film in -it came out mere months after the military coup that would dominate the coun...

It is the verbal and visual wit of early Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movies that sets them apart from other comedies or their vast array of imitators. Unlike the spoof films that came after and hit peak levels of obnoxious by the 2000s, the films of ZAZ -specifically Airplane! , Top Secret! , and the first Naked Gun  (as well as the short-lived show that birthed it, Police Squad )- had a highly intelligent, absurdist streak behind a lot of their dumb jokes that paired excellently with disciplined deadpan humour. That has never really been replicated, perhaps deemed too much a signature of ZAZ alone. If anything is to try however, it ought to be a reboot of The Naked Gun . Of course it is something of a double-edged sword for a lega-sequel to attempt that: hedge too close to repetition and it’s hollow mimicry, stray too far and its abandoning the spirit of the original. Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) articulates this openly early on to a picture of his predecessor, hoping that he can...

There are a few moments, including right at the start, where Oh, Hi!  suggests it’ll be taking a very dark or harrowing turn -if not into full-on horror than into something akin to  Fatal Attraction  or Misery , just with a more modern lens. It would be the conventional way to approach this kind of story -and that is not on its face a bad thing - Companio n from earlier this year isn’t too far from it. But I respect the direction filmmaker Sophie Brooks and producer/star Molly Gordon took instead, even if it made for some complications and problematic plot developments. Essentially, it is the trope of the mad woman scorned taken with some sympathy - Fatal Attraction  if it were on Glenn Close’s side and far more judgemental of Michael Douglas. And especially in the context of a story less about thrills and tension than genuine relationship drama that is a curious idea. And Brooks and Gordon are a great team to facilitate that. Though Gordon isn’t credited on the scr...

Garbo Talks! In 1930, that was all the promotion you needed. Greta Garbo had only been in Hollywood for five years by that point but stardom came swiftly in the silent movie era, and especially for such a mysterious evocative personality like her. She’d made such a name for herself and her distinctive melodramatic acting style, and being a European export (the first in a line of great Swedish actresses of the silver screen), it was natural that with the dawn of the talkies there was immense curiosity over how she would make the transition, especially given she had no English when she first came to America. How would she fare in this new medium, and what would she sound like? To meet this anticipation, MGM, and Irving Thalberg specifically, very shrewdly chose for her a new film version of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Anna Christie , which already had garnered a reputation for the intensity of its titular role. It had been filmed already in 1923, but a sound version ...

The Fantastic Four have had a rough time in the movies. Though an incredibly significant superhero unit in the comics -debuting in 1961 as the “First Family” of the Marvel brand, efforts to translate them to film have been as rocky as The Thing. Roger Corman made an attempt in the early 1990s, aborted before it could be released. Fox then produced a pair of mildly successful through critically maligned films in the mid-2000s. And finally in a meagre effort to hang onto the brand, Fox produced a reboot in 2015 that was a disaster on every level. Then Marvel Studios managed to wrest back control, and almost forty films into their cinematic universe have now given it their own shot -at a time when they not only need it to be good for its own sake but for the studio’s pervasive credibility going forward, which has taken a hit in recent years due to a variety of factors. The Fantastic Four: First Steps  couldn’t possibly be everything it needs to be for Marvel right now -and indeed what...

For most of cinema history, the fantasy genre has been marginalized, often existing only in children’s films and the animated works of Walt Disney. The Wizard of Oz  was a groundbreaker, but it didn’t open the doors one would think. Because as in literature, fantasy was deemed an unserious genre -even a gargantuan figure like Tolkien was rarely uttered in the same breath as revered geniuses like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf. Even among the populists of Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, or Truman Capote, no fantasy writer would be found -certainly not one who wrote of wholly fictional worlds and races, active magic and mystical battles. For the film industry the genre might have been deemed far too niche and far too expensive to produce to be worth the stigma. In Hollywood certainly, but also in most other national film industries, fantasy never managed to get a foothold really -until 2001 when The Lord of  the Rings trilogy broke...