Reviews of the Bosch

The reverberations from   Everything Everywhere All at Once  were slow, but they have at last arrived, at least to some degree, with Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die , the first movie since that sensation of 2022 to go for a similarly eccentric high concept built on some degree of absurdism with a deeper and very conscious meaning underpinning its world and stakes. It is directed by Gore Verbinski -his first movie in nine years- and it is fittingly wild and silly in the vein of his Pirates of the Caribbean  movies (especially the latter two), but its unique concept and stalwart thematic integrity comes courtesy of screenwriter Matthew Robinson. Both, it would seem, have a bone to pick with the technological dependency of the modern world -with A.I. and virtual reality specifically and what it all means for the future of humanity. Their outlook is bleak, but at least there's some fun to be had in the possibly vain effort to amend it. The movie opens with Sam Rockwell as...

Tribute acts are a strange little corner of the music world. Out in the barrens (such as where I live) where major musical artists rarely travel, they are indeed a suitable and cheap alternative to experiencing the real thing. And especially for older folks, fans of artists either very aged or deceased, there’s a nostalgic pleasure to seeing people dressing up in 60s or 70s clothes and singing the songs of their youth. But this is not a steady or particularly lucrative demographic, and there is something unavoidably cheesy about tribute acts, especially of the boomer music variety. They tend to embody the has-been nature of the subjects incredibly starkly. And they’re typically not really thought of as musical artists in their own right, relying on songs by other people (that are often easy enough for a competent musician to learn) rather than taking a risk on anything new or personal. A movie at the scale and style of Craig Brewer’s Song Sung Blue  would be more likely to feature ...

Dracula  has been adapted so many times and so many different ways that new interpretations are not only inevitable but necessary. And it is possible to re-theme the story, which does involve the title character pursuing a specific woman, as a romance. Both the 1979 film by John Badham and the 1992 film by Francis Ford Coppola leaned into a theme of Mina Harker being the reincarnation of Dracula’s long-lost lover and casting his interests in her therefore as a human impulse of romantic reunion. It is a tenuous pretense to make work, the predatory nature of the Dracula character not something that translates easily to authentic notions of love -and to even attempt it one must be confident in their portrait of the vampire -resting in the aforementioned cases on the sexual charisma of a figure like Gary Oldman or especially Frank Langella. Dracula , the 2025 French film going for an even greater scope of romantic melodrama, casts Caleb Landry Jones -a character actor known for his uns...

Rainer Werner Fassbinder really knew how to make the most of a set-piece, huh? There is one scene under the opening credits of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant that is a distinct exterior shot. Everything else across a great span of time takes place in the gaudy apartment of the titular character, adorned with nude statuettes and a giant painting on the wall behind the bed of the Nicolas Poussin piece Midas and Bacchus  -a highly symbolic work for the purposes of the story, uniting the famous Greek hedonist with the king so ubiquitous with wealth and status he could turn anything into gold. Their avatars are women here, but function in a similar way, including in their curious relationship to each other. It is somewhat comforting to see a movie from 1972 that is not only about a lesbian romance but a very messy lesbian romance. It’s nearest analogue may be The Killing of Sister George  from four years prior, but that film was a lot more campy and treated its same-sex relatio...

It is instinctive to be sceptical of a movie produced with the direct involvement of the party depicted in it, even if that party happens to be an organization with as upstanding a record as the Red Crescent Society. Obviously, they have a vested interest in their workers and volunteers being depicted in certain ways that maintain their organization’s credibility. And we’ve seen movies that are just puff-pieces for their companies. But director Kaouther Ben Hania, a filmmaker with as much experience in documentary as with narrative films, finds a way around that conflict of interest by proving at every point she can the factual validity of what she is depicting. And with a story like this that is especially important. The death of Hind Rajab is one of the most enduring and potent tragedies of the Israeli genocide in Gaza -a six-year-old girl whose family car was mercilessly and repeatedly attacked by the IDF, resulting in the deaths of several of her family members, before the ambulanc...

The Shakers they were called. An offshoot sect of the Quakers known for their gender and racial egalitarianism, communal Utopian philosophy, agrarian lifestyle, and adherence to strict sexual abstinence. Also their worship practices involved dramatic swaying and dances, hence the name. Even as someone who grew up in a Christian community, I had no awareness of the Shakers and the curious history of their great prophet (and to some the second coming of Christ themselves) Ann Lee, who led a small flock from her native Manchester to New York state to establish a colony in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Watching Mona Fastvold’s phenomenal movie on these subjects I couldn’t believe the “Shakers” were even their real name. That turned out to be true, and while I don’t know how much else strictly is (although given the sources in the end credits, it appears that Fastvold and her partner and co-writer Brady Corbet did Robert Eggers levels of research here), this depiction of th...