Reviews of the Bosch

The people at the heart of Bugonia  are real. Maybe in certain echo chambers it might not seem like it; like a guy who is convinced that he’s the hero of They Live , who is correctly cognizant of the inequities of the modern age -ecological destruction, corporate hegemony, political and economic manipulation- but rather than admit to their true institutional and mundane roots chooses to interpret them through the lens of alien conspiracy, and is so casually confident in this. I have met these people, victims of the very systems they rail against by their inadequate access to real mental healthcare. Yorgos Lanthimos knows of them, perhaps has met such people himself, and he has a certain sympathy for them -if it does go hand-in-hand with ample mockery of the various lengths of elaborate and convoluted lore such conspiracies are built on. And the way it intersects with the auspices of real power is too entertaining to him to pass up. It was likewise the case for Jang Joon-hwan back i...

This is not a movie for the faint of heart, particularly if great anxiety is a trigger. I say that while recommending a film I think is quite good and lauding it for its willingness to express its intensity of stress so openly. But there is a lot of it, piling up all at once, to the point you feel as hopelessly buried as the film’s central character. The title  If I Had Legs I’d Kick You  does not refer to anything directly in the film, but it is an incredibly pertinent sentiment in its articulation of that critical feeling of dour helplessness mixed with impotent rage. It is a concoction writer-director Mary Bronstein handles tremendously well, to the point you wonder how much of the emotional exhaustion of this film -which is all very relatable even if some of the specifics are not- comes from a real place. But then of course it does, even if not personally so. Any one of the episodes that befalls Rose Byrne’s Linda, let alone all of them together, would put considerable str...

This season has had a few decent episodes so far, either in terms of their premise or jokes, in spite of some lapses in construction or presentation. Admittedly, I have assessed them a little bit on a curve. They’ve been on the better end of the metric of the Hulu episodes, but don’t compare to the median of the show’s overall quality. But I’m glad to say that “Crab Splatter” at last does -the first unambiguously good episode this season. Written by Shirin Najafi, it features a character pairing that I can’t remember ever appearing before -Leela and Dr. Zoidberg; though the episode actually begins with Amy and Kif and a meteor striking their apartment building, destroying the home of the Johnson family below them. Embedded with crystals, Amy takes the meteorite to the Professor, who determines it is an ancient specimen from Decapod 10. They return it to that planet where anthropologist Dr. Judith explains its origin within the evolutionary history of the Decapodians -planetary debris f...

I’ve been in the online movie space for a long time, and so it would be impossible for me to not be at least mildly familiar with Chris Stuckmann. For well over a decade he has been among the most popular movie reviewers on YouTube, and indeed I did watch his videos back when it was a genre I was invested in (I may have even been subscribed for a time). I’d vaguely heard he was interested in making movies himself, yet it’s still a little surreal to see that come to fruition. You don’t often see people anymore make that leap from popular film critic to filmmaker. Stuckmann did, and though he’s a critic I’ve often disagreed with, I’m happy for him, and was very curious about his debut, a horror movie now released after a very long production period, called Shelby Oaks . It is a micro-budget independent feature, crowdfunded as many a YouTuber project is, and shot entirely in Stuckmann’s home state of Ohio. It was completed and saw its first festival appearances more than a year ago, b...

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere  has a lot in common with   A Complete Unknown . Both music biopics that, rather than attempt a holistic picture of an artists’ life, hone in on a very particular period that speaks to the artist’s personality, creativity, and significance. A key difference though is that A Complete Unknown  keeps Bob Dylan’s personal biography at an arm’s length where  Deliver Me from Nowhere  embraces it -in fact it makes it central to the movie’s story. This is in keeping with very broad music biopic tropes, especially down to the flashbacks to childhood filtered through a melancholy black-and-white lens. And even as the movie doesn’t cover the whole career of Bruce Springsteen, it does present the kind of close-ended story that the worst of this genre is known for. And yet there is something it taps at that is engaging about Bruce, much as I don’t entirely think director Scott Cooper understands his subject as well as he would like to. Je...

It is a good time for the Modern Prometheus. Though I sadly wasn’t able to get in to see it while there, one of the biggest hits at this year’s Toronto Film Festival was the long-awaited Guillermo del Toro adaptation of Frankenstein . For the man whose made the theme of monsters his bread and butter and whose debut feature Cronos  was very Frankenstein -esque it seems a perfect pairing of filmmaker and subject. But he’s not the only one at the moment drawn to the classic literary creature. Maggie Gyllenhaal has her own revisionist take on the story called The Bride  coming out early next year, which itself in its apparent feminist themes seems to be taking up the baton of another recent film that heavily owes a debt to the work, Poor Things . More than two centuries after Mary Shelley wrote her cautionary tale about playing god, her creation -much like Victor Frankenstein’s- is still so much more powerful than she could have imagined. We are still obsessed with it today. ...