Reviews of the Bosch

Posts

Don Bluth Month: The Land Before Time (1988)

As a kid, I wasn’t so affected by the typical ‘traumatic’ death scenes of animated children’s movies. Mufasa’s death in The Lion King really did nothing for me. Same with Bambi’s mom even -it took until I was older to really appreciate the raw tragedy of that. But the one that did get me, much less popular than those, was the death of Littlefoot’s mother in The Land Before Time , and I still think it is perhaps the most effective death scene of this kind in a movie for kids. Both Simba and Bambi lose their parents entirely all of a sudden, but Littlefoot has to be there as his mother is dying, to take in her final sentiments to him, and it is heartbreaking, especially with the emotionally potent detail in the animation -the gloominess, the perfectly sad features. It honestly still gets me a little bit. I’m just old enough to be part of the generation where the Don Bluth movie most significant to my childhood was The Land Before Time . My family owned the movie on VHS, and some of my

Religious Debate Fuels Inventive Tension in Heretic

There is a strain of self-satisfied intellectualism to Heretic , a movie that is quite brazenly about interrogating faith and the foundations of religious beliefs more broadly. It can feel a touch pompous at times in its offensive, regardless of the validity underlining its text; and certainly a few of the lectures read like those dirtbag internet atheist screeds designed purely to get a rise out of the devout. Directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods approach the film’s subject matter as a mostly honest theological debate though, lending credence to an alternative viewpoint and criticising the fallacies in some of these arguments that take down religion. And in this case it is the smart decision not to come down firmly on either side. Beck and Woods have claimed that the horror of this film is rooted in its ideas more than conventional horror tropes and techniques. I think the horror in this movie is effective, but that they are quite wrong in this assessment. Heretic doesn’t draw horror

Blitz Pairs Dynamic Style with Shallow Subjects

Steve McQueen is known for his radical movies, and whether you like it or not, Blitz is his least radical. More in its substance than its style incidentally, which is still captivating at a number of junctures; but the story of a separated boy and his mother trying to find one another during the London Blitz, seems a rather passée topic for the man behind Shame , 12 Years a Slave , and Small Axe . Yet I can also see why he wanted to tell this story, certain corners of it especially. And the Blitz is a particular trauma of British war history that hasn’t been reckoned with a lot cinematically. We’ve seen more than a few stories about children sent to the countryside to avoid the Blitz, but what about those who were caught in the midst of it? For McQueen, Blitz is his World War II movie, concentrated on the home front and what life was like for working class and marginalized Britons living through it. It’s the story of George (Elliot Heffernan), a biracial kid living in Stepney in the

Anora is a Piquant and Exhilarating Ruptured Fairy Tale

There comes a point in Anora when you realize you don’t actually care much about Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch and love interest of the title character. He’s just a dumb, reckless, immature kid addicted to sex and video games, and acting on impulse. What happens to him and with his family doesn’t matter. But you care because Ani cares, you get swept up because she gets swept up, you hold out hope for him and for their relationship because she does. She is the movie’s lightning rod for your sentiments, and fairly effortlessly so. If anything can be especially distinct about Sean Baker’s voice as a director, it is his particular interest in and sympathy towards sex workers. His last four movies have all touched on that world in various ways looking to bring nuance to a stigmatized community. Anora is perhaps his biggest swing in this direction yet -it’s certainly his biggest movie yet, the one that netted him the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival t

Don Bluth Month: An American Tail (1986)

Though it kind of came and went without much fanfare, someone who did notice and appreciate The Secret of NIMH , was Steven Spielberg -ironically the man behind its biggest box office competitor. But he recognized immediately the talents of Don Bluth and his team, and as a fan of animation sought out the opportunity to produce their next movie. Not only that, he would help develop its story with Bluth and producer David Kirschner -an American immigrant story told through the lens of anthropomorphic animals that recalled the Russian-Jewish migrations of the late nineteenth century that brought Spielberg’s own grandparents to America. He even imposed a few details passed down to him about life in that time and gave the protagonist his grandfather’s original Yiddish name, ‘Fievel’. But the input was collaborative, even as Bluth occasionally felt suffocated by studio control. And with the resources of Universal behind it thanks to Spielberg’s name, it was a union that worked out tremendous

The Criterion Channel Presents: Brighton Rock (1948)

The gangster movie genre tends to be thought of in the vein of the renaissance it experienced in the 1970s and on and off through to the 90s. That was the era when Francis Ford Coppola made it prestige and when Martin Scorsese made it grounded. But the gangster movie existed from the earliest days of Hollywood and had a particular heyday in the 1930s and 40s: The Public Enemy , Little Caesar , White Heat , the original Scarface . But these were largely sensational in nature, interested in shocking the audience with crime more than exploring the subject and the characters. But at least one gangster movie from this era seems to pre-empt the later forms the genre would take, and for a genre so deeply American it is perhaps a mite insulting that it came from across the pond. Brighton Rock was based on a novel by Graham Greene, who adapted it himself with fellow acclaimed playwright Terence Rattigan, about a low-level British gangster whose violence catches up to him as he reckons with the