Reviews of the Bosch

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If It Only Had the Nerve

The ‘celebrity sex pass’ is a decently fun concept to base a comedy around. A lot of couples have one -the one celebrity crush they are theoretically permitted by their partner to have sex with should the chance arrive. It is of course something highly unlikely to happen; but the notion of it happening, and for the other then to seek out their own celebrity sex pass to even the score is a funny premise. It’s not too far off a general sitcom episode formula. But what kind of mind would pair that with a pastiche of The Wizard of Oz ? David Wain apparently, whose new movie Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass does just that. It took a little while admittedly for me to pick up on the particular piece that Wain was structuring his story around, but it does become incredibly unsubtle after a time. It’s an approach worth admiring for its uniqueness, and how much fun Wain and his collaborators are clearly having with the idea, which lends itself well to the hyperbolic pseudo-parody style ...

Heated Reciprocity: A Radiant though Rudimentary Queer Coming-of-Age

By 2026, queer coming-of-age stories like Girls Like Girls are a dime a dozen. But it is easy to forget how it really has just been less than twenty years or so that queer identity in youth has not been a stigmatized subject. In 2017, Moonlight won the Oscar for Best Picture . And nowadays, movies like Love, Simon and Bottoms have even mainstreamed the subject, and numerous other teen movies think of nothing of casting multiple queer characters. This wasn’t the case a few decades ago when someone like Hayley Kiyoko, struggling with her sexuality while a teenage actress and singer, would have needed the positive reinforcement. If Girls Like Girls feels a bit out of the date, that’s somewhat intentional -Kiyoko made it as much for her teenage self as her audience. It is of course based on her own 2015 song which she then turned into a 2021 novel that is the direct source of her filmmaking debut here. It is Kiyoko’s baby every step of the way, a very personal story that she doesn...

The Criterion Channel Presents: The Burial of Kojo (2018)

In their trips in a boat out on the lake, Esi’s father would tell her stories that only made sense if you knew the ending. In The Burial of Kojo , Esi tells us a story that we already know the ending to, by virtue of its title -a way of keeping her father’s spirit alive even through the structure of how she presents his narrative. It’s a perfectly poetic choice in a very poetic movie. The Burial of Kojo was the feature debut of Ghanaian director Blitz Bazawule, before he became a creative partner to Beyonc é , directing her visual album Black is King -a companion to her Lion King soundtrack, and subsequently the movie musical version of The Color Purple . Those almost certainly wouldn’t have come without this film though, a much more interesting movie (at least compared to The Color Purple ) that infuses a sense of grand spiritualism and magical realism into a story of some grit and grounded circumstances. A beautifully haunting and enigmatic parable of a movie. It gets a lot of tract...

A Half-Baked Supergirl Film Resists Setting Itself Apart

Supergirl has always been essentially just a female derivation of Superman. From back in the days when just a bland gender-swap was deemed enough in the comics industry to make up for a lack of female characters -Batgirl is just the same. There is something inherently condescending about the character’s existence, and it does feel especially so when she is the subject of the sophomore feature for a new cinematic universe. It is weird that James Gunn and Peter Safran at DC would jump to her this quickly as opposed to someone like Wonder Woman. Supergirl has evolved of course into more of a distinct character over the years but that is not known to general audiences who see the name and iconography as merely piggy-backing off of a more successful entity. This movie, Supergirl , acknowledges that throughout, whether by ham-fistedly commenting on the laziness of such a designation as mere counterpart to a man (and referring to Kara Zor-El as a ‘girl’ despite being an adult in this universe...

Julian Schnabel’s Bizarre Epic Fails to Meet Dante’s Peak

I wonder how familiar Julian Schnabel is with Sunday in the Park with George . He’s a New Yorker and an artist so the chances I think are pretty high. It is one of Stephen Sondheim’s perhaps underrated musicals but a favourite of mine and just about everyone else who has seen it. It is about a painter, Georges Seurat, and his obsession with finishing his great masterpiece while also about a cynical modern descendant reckoning with that work. It is a very compelling premise that invites new consideration of not only the legacy of an artist but an interrogation of artistry itself. And Schnabel is certainly interested in those themes, having explored them in his two movies about complicated artists, Basquiat and At Eternity’s Gate . In the Hand of Dante is not like those films. Really, it’s not like any film, at least in the details. But it does feel like a culmination of sorts for Schnabel, who has been working on it in some capacity or another for fifteen years -since it was being dev...

Back to the Feature: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a very gay play. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , the 1958 movie adaptation by Richard Brooks tries the best it can not to be that. And yet… the gay text has a way of seeping through. In some of the context and material, there’s no way that it couldn’t. Not that it assuaged Williams very much, a gay man himself, who hated this adaptation of arguably his second most famous play in spite of its other aspects that remain loyal -such as its staging and a few of its cast members. But it was indisputably toned down in spite of what material it kept, and you wonder if it wouldn’t have been had it been made even just a few years later -this being very much one of the last movies notably touched by the Hays Code, in some respects. Certainly one might guess the censors were a touch prickled by one of the movie's signature selling points: the sex appeal of Elizabeth Taylor, emphasized in the film poster and promotional stills. It made for an enduring ima...