Reviews of the Bosch

Taika Waititi was not the right person to make Klara and the Sun . There were several moments while watching this adaptation of the bestselling novel by Kazuo Ishiguro that I could see exactly what Waititi was going for and how it would work in the hands of a director like Steven Spielberg or Guillermo del Toro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet or even Wes Anderson. Hell, Hirokazu Kore-eda proved this year with the similar Sheep in the Box   that he was capable of handling a sentimental story about a child-like artificial consciousness. But Waititi, who does have real strengths as a director, is not convincingly capable of the required level of earnestness here and he can't help himself when it comes to certain proclivities with his dialogue and characterization -which have their place in his other films but feel quite inappropriate here. For one thing, Klara and the Sun is set in a dystopia that is never treated as such by the narrative, merely alluded to on a few brief occasions and as quickly...

The story of Wicker feels like it ought to predate that of the movie it is at risk of being confused with, The Wicker Man . It is credited to a fable called “The Wicker Husband”, which might be an old folktale from the pre-Norman past of England for its parable-like moral narrative and lack of official names for any of its characters who might as well be mere metaphorical symbols. But in actual fact it was a short story written just a few years ago by Ursula Wills, who does a remarkable job in adopting that particular style and character in a convincing but thoroughly contemporary manner. I can’t imagine a woman’s agency being all that popular a topic in even the pagan days of yore. It is filtered into movie form by directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, and while I can’t say whether its particular sense of humour and ironic tone is native to its source, it detracts surprisingly little from the ethos being communicated -that ethos being a rather stark reworking of Beauty an...

The 2026 Amazon Prime miniseries of Carrie is an important full-circle moment. It is a new adaptation of Stephen King’s first published novel releasing on the fiftieth anniversary of the first adaptation of that same novel -and the first adaptation of one of King’s works at all. It marks the longevity of both the writing career of one of the most successful novelists of all time, and how for almost as long that oeuvre has been a treasure trove for adaptation. And make no mistake, adaptations are a big part of King’s legacy. He would have been lauded as a successful writer regardless, but it’s the movie translations (and to a lesser extent TV) that have visualized his stories and made him not just a literary but pop cultural phenomenon. The iconography of such movies have become intertwined with the stories themselves, even where they have differed vastly from their source material. And there are many -including myself, admittedly- who know his work chiefly through these interpretatio...

The ‘creepy child’ trope in horror most likely originates in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw , one of the great classic ghost stories and works of psychological horror. But it is one thing to read about the eerie behaviour of two children, it is another thing to see it in practice -hence why the novel made for a popular adaptation on stage. However it didn’t make it to the silver screen until 1961, when playwright William Archibald adapted his own version, renamed The Innocents , with Truman Capote and director Jack Clayton produced a truly haunting work. And though movies like The Bad Seed and Village of the Damned had primed the pump, what we think of when we think of creepy children as a horror movie device perhaps found its first footing here. The spectre of Damien from The Omen , the kid from Insidious , Brightburn and so many other freaky manipulative movie children can be found in little Miles, however innocent he may or may not be. That is of course the other great sourc...