Reviews of the Bosch

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...

I don’t know if anybody was asking what The Blue Lagoon  would look like in the hands of Sam Raimi, but we’re quite fortunate that he decided to show us anyway. It’s been a long time since Raimi has directed outside of the typical Hollywood franchise bubble -the last movie to truly be called his own was 2009’s Drag Me to Hell . In fairness, he did have a hiatus of about a decade before Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness  in 2022, during which he time he produced a fair number of weird genre projects for other directors. And maybe something rubbed off on him, to a small degree on his Marvel film -which is at least aesthetically more weird and compelling than a lot of its cohorts- but especially so on his latest movie, which seems to prove he doesn’t just have superhero films to offer anymore. And Send Help  is refreshingly free and loose and twisted in a way that we both haven’t seen from him in a while and has just in general been missing from mainstream c...

“It was not Hitler or Himmler who deported me, beat me, and shot my family. It was the shoemaker, the milkman, the neighbour who were given a uniform and then believed they were the master race.” -Karl Stojka, Holocaust survivor For some reason I’ve been thinking a lot about Nuremberg lately. And it has nothing to do with the film last fall of the same name , though that of course too came to mind watching Stanley Kramer’s seminal courtroom drama about Holocaust accountability, Judgment at Nuremberg . The lessons that the world took away from that episode of history and indeed the themes relayed in this film feel only too relevant in this moment of history that with any luck will end on its own repeat of Nuremberg levels of accountability. That being said, Kramer’s film is a bit of an odd beast where the subject of Nuremberg is concerned. It is not in fact a biographical retelling of the Judges’ Trial of 1947 -the context of the war, the Holocaust, and the Nazis all remain in place, bu...

Mercy  is a movie constructed of shameless copaganda and gross A.I. apologia. It’s no wonder that Jeff Bezos -whose Amazon owns MGM- is ultimately behind it. It is also little surprise that Chris Pratt, whose personal conservative proclivities have come out more and more frequently in recent years, is its central star, though spending much of the movie sat in a chair. The film is directed by Timur Bekmambetov, of Wanted  and more appropriately last year’s disastrous War of the Worlds adaptation and uses a similar dependence on storytelling through screens here -a gimmick that was once neat and interesting when something like   Searching was a one-off, but has become increasingly dull and repetitive a conceit. How many times do we need to zoom in on a new tab or window opening? At least this one lets us see into Pratt’s immediate surroundings. Extremely faint praise though and about all that this movie deserves as it seems to exist as the Devil’s Advocate for artificial i...