Reviews of the Bosch

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...

Nothing says summer like a middle-aged man waltzing around the neighbourhood in nothing but a bathing suit diving into backyard swimming pools and occasionally flirting with much younger women. There must have been something in the chlorine in the late 1960s, to have seen at least two movies, released a year apart and in different countries to centre thriller plots around private swimming pools in the heat of summer with characters who spend the bulk of the film unclothed. But where La Piscine , which came out in 1969 in France, is characterized by a dangerous eroticism in its crisp, sultry cinematography escalating its tensions to a fever pitch, its predecessor The Swimmer  is more picturesque and aesthetic in design, its brazenness rather delineating gradually from a place of high esteem and purpose to one of intense uncertainty and timidity. In cruder terms, La Piscine  is a film that rises to explosive climax, while The Swimmer  shrivels into impotence. Like getting o...

The movie landscape as we know it would not exist without Jaws . That is a statement without judgement, the popular status of  Jaws  as the original summer blockbuster may be used to critique the effect of its progeny as much as commend, but it is still a true fact that the movie industry and movie culture would be vastly different today and at any point in the last several decades were it not for this one shark movie that happened to capture the world by storm fifty years ago this month. The phenomenon of  Jaws though is often separate from the movie itself, which in spite of its records set for the time and outsize impact on the direction the movie business has pursued ever since, would have been a great movie regardless of these effects. And yet they do matter. They are the reason we are still talking about Jaws  five decades on, the reason why Steven Spielberg -who honestly assumed during its famously troubled production that it would be the last movie he would b...

Probably the most powerful image in Danny Boyle’s seminal zombie film 28 Days Later  was that of a lone man dwarfed against an empty London. One of the most bustling thoroughfares in the world, the sight of it quiet and abandoned was disarming and haunting. You were prompted to wonder what seismic thing could have happened to cause such a bewildering phenomenon. That was in 2002. By 2025, we have seen London empty in nearly the same state as Boyle depicted twenty-three (a few years shy of twenty-eight) years ago. That calibre of apocalyptic imagery has become distinctly tangible, even if the nature of its effects have not -and it has been a sobering thing. Really, that is the key difference between 28 Days Later and 28 Years Later . Behind the scenes there really aren’t so many. Not only has Boyle come back (marking also his first movie as director in seven years), but Alex Garland, whose own filmmaking career arguably stems from the success of his screenplay for 28 Days Later , ha...

Have all children at some point or another wished for what Elio Solis did? Or some similar variation? Or was it just a few of us? Clearly it was enough to generate a whole Pixar movie out of the concept -often a space for creative animators to reckon with unresolved issues of adolescence. But if the exact desire expressed in Elio , of longing for escape from this world for one where you are more readily accepted and loved, isn’t quite universal, the underpinning emotion of loneliness certainly is. The brainchild of Coco  writer Adrian Molina (initially the director of the film, though he left to make Coco 2  and was replaced by Turning Red ’s Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian), Elio  is the story of a child, raised at an air force base by his aunt Olga after the deaths of his parents. With a fixation on space and the notion of alien life stemming from a fantasy of being taken away to a world where he belongs, Elio does against all odds manage to live his dream wh...

In an early scene of Celine Song’s Materialists , a bride is seen getting cold feet on her wedding day. She’s never much believed in the institution of marriage, she feels swept up in the social obligation of it, and she recognizes a real shallowness in the fact her motivation is bent around the jealousy she senses in her sister over her handsome wealthy husband-to-be. She confesses all this to of all people, her matchmaker Lucy -played by Dakota Johnson. Lucy very calmly and concisely asserts from this last point that what this means is that the bride loves her groom because he makes her feel valuable, like someone to envy. It is transparent  emotional manipulation from a woman who herself clearly values this wedding as a favourable mark on her reputation, but Lucy is a very good salesperson -her commodity just happens to be love, or the illusion of it. And it works like a charm. Lucy is a woman who sees romantic compatibility as a mathematical formula to solve -it’s merely  ...