Reviews of the Bosch

Any primatologist is free to correct me, but I somehow doubt a chimpanzee has quite the muscle strength depicted in this movie to rip through human faces like they’re silly putty. Primate  is the latest in a surprisingly long line of killer monkey movies, such as Monkey Shines and Link , although it is perhaps the first to use the lifelike motion-capture technology developed primarily through the  modern Planet of the Apes series  to render its homicidal simian as opposed to a real trained animal. Safer certainly for the cast and crew, and it affords some new degrees of horror effects, which director Johannes Roberts is only too happy to exploit. But enhanced visual tangibility isn’t everything -we’ve seen other movies with realistic-looking apes and other movies about wild animals stalking defenceless humans. How does one make such a film stand out as more than a mere creature-feature? It turns out there are a few ways, though they don’t necessarily interest R...

But for a handful of scenery changes, a few thoughtful pauses coloured by dramatic gothic music, and occasional interjections from Rebecca Hall’s Linda Rosenkrantz, Peter Hujar’s Day  is really one great monologue of just over an hour delivered by Ben Whishaw as the titular character. It’s an excuse really to show off the dedication of his performance stamina and acting capacity, and that’s not a bad rationale for a movie by any means. James Whitmore got an Oscar nomination for essentially doing just that in  Give ‘Em Hell, Harry!  -adapted from a one-man show about Harry Truman. But director Ira Sachs doesn’t just make this movie a filmed version of a one-man show; though she doesn’t speak nearly as often, Hall’s performance as Linda is essential to the piece -not just as someone to give licence to this talk but to allow it the casual air of two friends and not just an interviewer and her subject. The origin of the film is very fascinating. In 1974, Rosenkrantz, a n...

The Young Girls of Rochefort  might be the comfort movie of the French New Wave. It's certainly one of the bubbliest and most spirited -a film by Jacques Demy that follows up on his masterful The Umbrellas of Cherbourg , with which it has a lot in common -the big exception being a tone of bliss and optimism to replace bittersweet regret. It is a movie with a summer festival and big dance numbers and a broadly grinning Gene Kelly. What miseries there are in the characters are dispelled by the end -it is perhaps a purer tribute to old Hollywood musicals than Demy's last film, imbued with all of his and composer Michel Legrand's signature charms. Set in the port town of Rochefort, the story concerns two twin sisters, Delphine and Solange played by real sisters (though not real twins) Catherine Deneuve and Fran ç ois Dorl é ac -the former blonde, the latter redheaded. They work as ballet instructors but dream of finding love and moving to Paris. Over the course of a weekend the...

If the zombie genre is known for anything, in terms of its metaphorical resonance, it is an allegory for grief. Numerous zombie movies contend with a plot element of the hero having to let go of someone they care about, often in a traumatically violent way. In We Bury the Dead  that moment may have already happened before the story begins -it is the confirmation and closure on it that is the driving force. The movie, by Australian director Zak Hilditch, had its premiere many months ago at the Sundance Film Festival and it’s a shame it didn’t get a wider release in time for Halloween, instead only slipping by discreetly at this time of the new year where it is very soon to be supplanted by the next 28 Years Later movie. This is especially ironic given its low budget and limited resources bear on it a resemblance to 28 Days Later , right down to the human behaviour in and around a zombie apocalypse being far more interesting and frightening than the zombies themselves. Hilditch’s ins...

If there was ever a genre for the British to do the definitive spoof of it would be the costume drama. It is such a ubiquitous form of British media -every U.K. actor has done at least one somewhere in their career, they are a constant in the national media landscape with their own dramatic language, tropes, and conventions ripe for riffing on. But then the parody film itself is a bit of an awkward animal on the pantheon of British comedy, which traditionally tends more towards wit and more general absurdity. There isn’t a culture of spoof films over there like there is in America; even where British comedy has incorporated parody it has been less about specific stories or genres, and more general events or conventions perhaps linked to a theme like history or class. The best British parodies I have seen have been short-form sketches by the likes of French & Saunders or for Comic Relief. And I would still say that holds true. Fackham Hall  is a spoof very much in the style...

I think we’ve reached a new form of soulless Hollywood reboot -the meta-reboot. Where a movie makes abundantly clear it knows how tired we all are of the schtick and throws a big lampshade over the whole thing to give the impression it is a clever commentary on the reboot machine, but is for all intents and purposes no different from any more commonplace attempt to recycle a brand. The Naked Gun  had a few gags towards this theme, but wisely didn’t make it the entire premise -also it was genuinely very smart and funny. Anaconda  does make it the entire premise, and it is not particularly smart or funny. Anaconda  (1997) was not even ever that beloved a movie to begin with, outside of a cult audience that developed around its B-movie silliness -not unlike Tremors . Though Tremors  actually was aware of what it was -unlike Anaconda which tried to take seriously its schlocky effects and schlockier performances. But I guess come 2025 it was one of the few franchise title...