Reviews of the Bosch

  It’s about time I brought some international flavour to this blog. And I wanted to see one Foreign Film nominee before the Oscars. This was the one available. A Fantastic Woman is a Chilean film from director Sebasti á n Lelio that tells an emotional story of grief and identity with tender and intimate detail that’s sure to make bigger stars of its director and especially lead actress.  Marina Vidal (Daniela Viga) is a young trans woman in Santiago, who’s in a relationship with an older man Orlando (Francisco Reyes). When he suddenly becomes ill and dies, his family begin shunning her, forbidding her from attending the funeral or wake. In addition to this, she is treated with suspicion and disrespect by the doctors and police, forcing her on an emotional journey to affirm herself as a woman. The narrative of this movie is one that hits home for a lot of trans men and women. It presents an unfiltered look at the way society views them, from the small discretions to ...

There’s a curious nihilistic theme that’s beginning to recur in the films of Alex Garland. He seems very fascinated with the way humans approach the unknown and how it could detrimentally impact us. That theme was illustrated excellently in his 2015 debut Ex Machina , it even appears in the screenplay for 28 Days Later  (which in retrospect appears more his film than Danny Boyle’s), and it plays a big part in Annihilation , a rather provocative sci-fi horror film based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer. When her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) returns unexpectedly from a covert special ops mission after having been missing for over a year, biology professor Lena (Natalie Portman) is brought into the fold of a government agency investigating the Shimmer -a mysterious entity of possibly extraterrestrial origin that has manifested itself in a national park and is spreading. With Kane the only survivor of the last expedition, severely ill and suffering amnesia, Lena volunteers to accom...

Billy Wilder was one of the best directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Sure he didn’t have the versatility of William Wyler or the sheer style of Hitchcock, but he had a real skill for telling great human stories that made for terrific films like The Apartment , Sunset Boulevard , and Sabrina . And that’s certainly true of his 1945 Best Picture winner The Lost Weekend , a dismal and harrowing tale of a man tormented by alcoholism. With serious subject matter, an intense and melancholy atmosphere, inventive visuals, and a remarkable leading performance, it’s sure to have had a great effect at curbing one of the most common addictions there is. Based on the novel by Charles R. Jackson, the story follows Don Birnam (Ray Milland), a hopelessly alcoholic writer who misses his train for a weekend vacation with his doting girlfriend Helen (Jane Wyman) and his burdened brother Wick (Philip Terry). So he spends the weekend sinking further into his vice, going to exceedingly low places and...

This is the film Daniel Day-Lewis is going out on. Let’s not kid ourselves, the reason a lot of people are paying attention to Phantom Thread  is because acclaimed actor extraordinaire Daniel Day-Lewis has announced it’s his last film before retiring from the profession. And that is a big deal. The three-time Academy Award winning method actor has cemented a legacy of strong performances, even with such a relatively small filmography (this is only his seventh film of the last twenty years). It re-teams him with Paul Thomas Anderson, director of his second Oscar-winning turn in There Will Be Blood . But Phantom Thread  is a very different kind of movie -is it possible Day-Lewis’ last role will give him that last golden statue to tie Katharine Hepburn’s record? Set in 1950s London, the film is about a famous dressmaker, or couturier, called Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis), who while in the country becomes enamoured with a waitress Alma (Vicky Krieps). She becomes his muse...

Chevy Chase. John Belushi. Harold Ramis. Michael O’Donoghue. Bill Murray. Gilda Radner. All of them appear as characters in A Futile and Stupid Gesture , a recent movie on Netflix directed by David Wain. But the movie’s not about them, it’s centred on someone far less well-known but very influential: Doug Kenney, the co-founder of National Lampoon , and a person with a very interesting story and career that the people making this film were very impassioned to tell. After making his name as the President of the Harvard Lampoon  and co-writing a spoof novel called Bored of the Rings , Doug Kenney (Will Forte) aspires to create an alternative comedy magazine. With his partner Henry Beard (Domhnall Gleeson), he creates the National Lampoon  which steadily gains a following for its surreal humour and politically incorrect subject matter. But as the magazine flourishes, Kenney looks for other mediums of comedy to conquer while battling depression and severe cocaine addic...

There’s no doubt one of the most influential names in stop-motion animation is Nick Park. Likewise the studio he works for, Aardman Animations, has played a major part in bringing the art form to the west. However this hands-on sub-genre has evolved since Wallace & Gromit’s plasticine adventures delighted us in the early 1990s. With its innovative techniques and boundless creativity, Laika has become the new standard for stop-motion animation. And nothing reminds me of that more than seeing Park’s latest film Early Man , which seems starkly behind the times. This is a very weird movie, which is saying a lot for Aardman. And unlike something like The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists , that weirdness doesn’t work in its favour. A tribe of Stone Age primitives enjoy a peaceful existence living in a valley hunting rabbits until a Bronze Age army takes over their land forcing them out to the dangerous badlands. However, one young caveman called Dug (Eddie Redmayne) mana...

Every culture is built on traditions. And traditions can be important, even valuable. But it’s necessary to realize when they can be harmful or restrictive. Black Panther  understands this, and in adapting a fascinating, compelling world steeped in tradition, it’s not ignorant enough to avoid questioning when a traditional philosophy fails a culture. Following the events of Captain America : Civil War , Prince T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) is being crowned King of the nation of Wakanda: a highly technologically advanced country due to its adjacency to an alien metal called vibranium, which the rest of the world perceives as just another third world African nation. However he soon finds trouble when his throne is challenged by an outsider (Michael B. Jordan) who wants to reveal Wakanda’s secret and use its technology to dominate the world. Black Panther  is directed and co-written by Ryan Coogler, who’s certainly one of the best filmmakers to work with Marvel yet. He imb...

Loving Vincent  is such an appropriately bittersweet title. It evokes the adoration of Vincent van Gogh’s genius and work that he never received during his lifetime. He was the epitome of the tortured artist, and his life was a very sad story, as is touched on in this revolutionary film -the first to ever be animated through painting. And the movie’s beautiful design is matched by its beautiful meaning, exactly like a van Gogh painting. Set a year after van Gogh’s suicide, his friend and postman Joseph Roulin (Chris O’Dowd) asks his son Armand (Douglas Booth) do deliver the artists’ last letter to his brother Theo. Both are suspicious about his suicide as his last letters indicated he was in contented spirits. Learning that Theo too has died, Armand is soon directed to Auvers-sur-Oise, the community where van Gogh perished, and while there attempts an investigation into whether or not the painter may have been murdered. Obviously the most vividly impressive feature of...

I haven’t thought much about Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit  stories since I was read them as a small child. But I remember liking how cute and charming they were for basic morality tales, as well as the quaint little world they created. Potter (who was also interestingly enough a mycologist) was a pioneer of picture books and Peter Rabbit arguably the first great English childrens’ character. So obviously it was upsetting to see a movie coming out that looked by all accounts to be a complete bastardization of one of the most esteemed bodies of work in childrens’ literature. Walt Disney once attempted to get the rights to Peter Rabbit , but Potter refused. So Sony decided to prove that her fears were well-placed. After doing away with the rabbit-eating farmer Mr. McGregor (Sam Neill), Peter Rabbit (James Corden) is stunned by the arrival of his great-nephew Thomas (Domhnall Gleeson), who wants to refurbish the place and sell it off so he can afford his own shop in London. A...

In societies of relative luxury, there is always a problem of people ignoring poverty. For some of us in our day to day lives, it ’s easy to forget there are people living all around us, only getting by from paycheck to paycheck, if that. The Florida Project , from Tangerine  director Sean Baker, is all about gleaming humanity out of such marginalized people and drawing attention to their lives from the youngest vantage point -punctuating the social disparity by setting their story just outside the “Happiest Place on Earth”. Moonee (Brooklyn Prince) lives out of a hotel room in the obnoxiously kitschy town of Kissimmee, Florida a few miles down the highway from Walt Disney World, with her grossly negligent mother Halley (Bria Vinaite). She spends most of her days wandering around unsupervised with the other hotel kids, generally being a delinquent. The only person who seems to care for her well-being is the gruff manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe) who’s often impatient with Hal...

The Winchester Mystery House of San Jose is one of the most famous haunted mansions in North America. Built by the daughter-in-law of the man who invented the Winchester rifle, many claimed it was haunted by the ghosts of the people killed by those weapons. Looming and vast, it’s been a progenitor or inspiration behind countless haunted house stories including Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting of Hill House  and even Disney’s Haunted Mansion. Seems like the perfect subject matter to give to the directors of Jigsaw  doesn’t it? In 1906, Doctor Eric Price (Jason Clarke) is sent to San Jose to diagnose the eccentric heiress Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren) and determine if she is mentally well after a series of bizarre behaviours. When he arrives at the mansion she’s rebuilding, she reveals her communication with spirits as these same ghosts in the house begin to haunt him as well. Winchester  is an extremely formulaic horror movie. The plot is absolutely bana...

Today is the 206 th  birthday of Charles Dickens and I know you’re all celebrating; maybe not by reading one of his novels or stories (after all, they can be very long), but by watching one of the dozens of films made based on his works. So I decided to figure out which ones were the best; which films adapted their stories the most loyally, were closest in spirit, and were just the most skilfully made. It must be made clear though that many of the more well-known Dickens adaptations are miniseries, because the British love making miniseries’ out of every successful book in English literature. Thus you’ll find no mention of the acclaimed BBC versions of Nicholas Nickleby or Little Dorrit  on here (though I will highly recommend 2005’s incredible Bleak House  series). With that, here are the Top Ten Dickens Movies: photo courtesy of IMDB 10.   Oliver Twist  (2005) - I’m not going to pretend that Roman Polanski’s 2005 rendition of the Parish Boy’s Prog...