Reviews of the Bosch

A movie about mental illness made in the 1940s is bound to not hold up to modern psychological scrutiny. Hell, even psychological scrutiny within a decade or so of its release. To watch The Snake Pit  is to get a glimpse into how mental illness was perceived and treated in a time when it was barely understood and entirely stigmatized. Often, contemporary films that would depict conditions we might now identify as schizophrenia or psychosis would cast them as markers of someone to be either feared or pitied. Rarely was the subject addressed head-on and taken seriously. It was considered uncouth to do so. But by 1948, in the aftermath of the war and new concepts arising around PTSD and other traumas, perhaps Hollywood was ready to actually go there -or rather director Anatole Litvak was, who’d personally bought the rights to the novel of the same name by Mary Jane Ward and worked to make a film that would be empathetic towards people -though women especially- interred in asylums for ...

I think director Lee Cronin was way more interested in making an exorcism movie than a mummy movie, and the resulting attempt to pound a square peg into a round hole is not a very enthralling version of either. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy  -a title choice it should be made clear came from the producers- seems to have a largely passive interest in mummification, ancient Egypt, and the other typical aspects of mummy horror stories -and that is by design. Cronin thought the notion of an average, relatable character being mummified was more frightening than just the mummy itself being a monster that stalks the protagonists. And that is a fair point and a curious place to come at a new version of The Mummy  from. But the creativity to both the story and the horror mostly stops at that point. The titular Mummy of this film is more of a possessing spirit than an entity in its own right, sustained through generations via a sacrificial host. We first meet it in the basement of an Egyptian f...

In pitching her book about Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill , Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira) is asked by her publisher why she is the person to write it -what insight does she specifically have, and what can she distinctly bring to the subject? Presumably the album means a lot to her -Grace says as much when she first brings up the idea. So she should share how it has impacted and informed her life as evidence of its lasting legacy. Grace takes this all in …and then it never manifests anywhere afterwards. It might as well be any album she is writing about. Director Chandler Levack apparently based a lot of this movie, Mile End Kicks , on her own personal experiences -so perhaps on this note she didn’t actually learn much from it. Maybe that is harsh, the Morrissette piece is not the vital part of the story -it is the catalyst. But it is an awfully specific one, and is given an undue degree of attention through a handful of sequences of the movie -and yet Grace’s relationship to it...

Jane Austen and Mark Twain both left their final novels unfinished. Orson Welles didn’t live to see the completion of his swansong . Bach and Beethoven and dozens of classical composers began works they never lived to see to fruition. Painters like Benjamin West and J.M.W. Turner left behind work they were only in the middle of. And ironically enough, Robert William Buss as well -a grand portrait of the figure and stories of Charles Dickens, who likewise penned a final mystery unsolved. Incomplete masterpieces are common among great artists -who die, get waylaid, or lose inspiration. And yet the value in these works is tremendous. The notion of actually finishing them a daunting one. Should someone else dare to make that attempt? Can they? That question is of tremendous importance in The Christophers , the latest movie from Steven Soderbergh, written by Ed Solomon; and one that does feel uniquely personal to both -even as it comes at a time where Soderbergh seems strangely detached fro...

It should be stated clear upfront, You, Me & Tuscany  is one of those romantic-comedies made purely to showcase hot people falling in love against a gorgeous scenic backdrop. The last movie of that variety I saw, Anyone But You , interspersed it with a loose Shakespeare adaptation, but that itself played perfectly into the standard rom-com enemies-to-lovers trope. You, Me & Tuscany , directed by Kat Coiro, doesn’t have a classic literary element to it, but engages in the tried and true fantasy of the young woman travelling to an exotic locale where she is swept off her feet by a handsome stranger. There’s nothing wrong with that premise as a generic starting block, the bones to something more. But this is a movie that doesn’t really have much more despite its efforts to carve something of a unique situation into it. Halle Bailey stars as Anna, a cook turned house-sitter in New York who meets an Italian man called Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor) in a bar one night after losing...

Now that is how you make a good video game movie! With a bad Mario  film in theatres yet again, exemplifying loyalty to aesthetics of the video game medium without its actual effects, the question is once more raised of how one makes a ‘good’ video game movie that captures a semblance of the gaming experience. That interactivity, that tension of investment, solving problems and puzzles -how do you relate that to a cinematic medium? Well, even if Nintendo does not appear to be interested in that question, it is still from Japan that such innovation comes. Exit 8 , directed by Genki Kawamura, is based on the indie game of the same name -something that is not entirely apparent at first for those unaware. The game is fairly un-cinematic in design -it is more about puzzles and pattern recognition; but Kawamura finds an interesting way to translate it in a manner that is engaging, that develops a curious story for its ‘player’ character with resonating themes and ideas; and th...