Reviews of the Bosch

The most immediately enduring image from Na Hong-jin’s Hope is that of a man on horseback riding through the woods while firing a machine gun behind him at a large alien creature descending on him. Obviously it is meant to stick with you, Na slows it down and holds on it for quite some time, a technique he employs in other areas of action through his extremely ambitious genre blockbuster that is by some accounts the most expensive movie in Korean cinematic history. He certainly tries as best he can to make sure as much of that money is on screen as possible, but he also directs it with his own aesthetic flare to keep the momentum up and the stakes always extremely tangible. He knows innately where and how to make a shot look cool. And those moments really accentuate and elevate Hope against material that doesn’t always rise to a similar standard. The movie was one of the more contentious out of Cannes this year, a lot of praise going to some of its attributes while fierce criticism w...

The Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 is a curious episode of history as it represents likely the closest the peasantry of Medieval England actually got to overthrowing their aristocrats. It was a full-on movement that swept the countryside and made its way to London in very dramatic terms. But, like with almost any rebellion against the crown it was ultimately a failure. And the serfs continued to live in severe poverty and servitude to the upper classes for several centuries to come. It is an interesting thing to dramatize, hard to make into a cathartic story about class revolution that has resonance for a modern audience. That is what Paul Greengrass grapples with in The Uprising , a rare period film for the director known for his gritty true story modern action films (although he did make News of the World a few years back). His particular visual language is odd to see in a medieval context, specifically his use of shaky handheld camerawork which feels rather dissonant and distracting in t...

Though it is unusual for him, Sheep in the Box is not the first time that Hirokazu Kore-eda has dabbled in the realm of speculative fiction. His second narrative feature, After Life , entertained a curious concept on the space between life and death and the figures who ferry along souls about to rest. A little later he made Air Doll , a Pinocchio story about a sex doll that comes to life -but is much more innocent than that sounds. Sheep in the Box feels like a continuation of the themes touched on in Air Doll especially, specifically its depiction of an artificial intelligence looking for meaning in their existence. The film it resembles much more potently though is Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence -down to having roughly the same premise as its starting point. As a science-fiction device, A.I. itself does not have the same speculative innocence that it once did, and stories about the humanity of androids or artificially intelligent beings ring just a little differe...

The long opening scene of The Beloved plays out almost exactly like a similar early scene in Sentimental Value . An acclaimed and accomplished film director is meeting for lunch with his estranged daughter, who is an actress, hoping to persuade her to star in his next movie. There is even a beat where he compliments her recent television work whilst dismissing the medium itself. They are practically the same scene. But director Rodrigo Sorogoyen has different intentions than Joachim Trier -he lets the scene drag out longer, shoots it only in close-up parallel shots of the actors partly obscured by the head of whoever the shoulder angle is attached to. And it is bristling with a very different kind of tension, more hostile than wounded in the trauma of the relationship. Sentimental Value , as its title implied, was deeply heartfelt and emotional. There is no sentiment to The Beloved . Where Trier set his drama in the world of filmmaking as a way of commenting on and emphasizing the art...

“What we see, what we feel, what we observe. That is all that is truly real.” Occasionally in “Lord Nibbler in the Nothingverse” an emphasis is placed on the physiological importance of observation -and yes there is a Schrodinger’s Cat reference. It is a thematic tenet of the episode as well in the relationship between Leela and Nibbler, particularly on Nibbler’s end of how different he is when not recognizing Leela -the meaning of that recognition is reinforced heavily by the end. It is a strong centrepiece to an episode that I wish had matched it in substance -in spite of a heartfelt core this is the first mediocre outing this season since “Beef” . Nibbler is the primary character though, and we see that his relationship with Leela is showing a little more sign of wear. He’s still her “schnookums” but he can get on her nerves by scratching up her boot or eating a whole massive can of food before it lands in his dish. He is contacted though by his people who give him a new final missi...

Lega-sequels are all the rage these days. Any reasonably popular movie or television franchise is going to get one, it is only a matter of time. Most recently, a Days of Thunder sequel of all things has been announced. In 2026, the proliferation of revivals of media entities that were popular decades ago is indicative of a decline in creativity and risk within the whole industry and the regurgitative properties of late-stage capitalism in general. It is comical how far the billionaire moguls who run these corporations and don’t care a lick for art will go just to avoid making something new, convinced that a dedicated fanbase exists for every modestly popular thing of the last forty years and that will be what compels them to engage with this product and help it turn a profit. Legacy sequels have been around for ages though, back to times when there wasn’t so naked a cynicism around them. Return to Oz , The Color of Money , 2010: The Year We Make Contact -not all good, but they ende...