Reviews of the Bosch

Mary Shelley is one of the most important figures in the history of English literature, feminist literature, and science-fiction, and should have gotten her own movie years ago. Apart from her masterpiece 1818 novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (considered the first work of modern science-fiction), her life was an incredibly fascinating one, swept up as it was in the turbulent lives of the great Romantics. Mary Shelley , a biographic film from Wadjda  director Haifaa Al-Mansour should be brilliant, educational, and with the technical and performance prowess to render it an Oscar contender. But it isn’t, which is quite a shame. The film follows Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin (Elle Fanning), daughter of the late feminist Mary Wolstonecraft and author William Godwin (Stephen Dillane), and her meeting and romance with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Booth). Through her experiences with him and the other figures of the Romantic period, as well as her lifelong fascin...

I’d like to know what people were expecting when it was announced that Steve McQueen would be starring in another prison escape movie. No doubt some were anticipating another fun, adventurous, charmingly rebellious film much like The Great Escape . I would very much have liked to be in a theatre with such people when Papillon  came out, partly of course to see the movie on the big screen, but also to see the dumbfounded reactions by an audience more accustomed to McQueen’s conventional coolness. Papillon is based on the book of the same name by Henri Charriere, a.k.a. “Papillon” (for the butterfly tattoo on his chest), a pardoned French prisoner who escaped the penal colony of St.-Laurent-du-Maroni in French Guiana in 1941, after nine years’ imprisonment. It’s an incredibly fascinating story, even if it’s definitely not as true as it claims, and a very lucrative idea for a film adaptation. And Franklin J. Schaffner, the underrated director of movies like Planet of the A...

When Steven Spielberg was a kid, his parents got divorced, an emotionally trying moment in the life of any child who experiences family break-ups. To cope, he retreated to his imagination and created a friend, an alien whom he could confide in and trust with his feelings. Though he grew out of his fantasy of course, the memory of that turbulent time in his life and the little imaginary alien that helped him get through it remained strong. It’s debatable whether E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is Speilberg’s greatest film, but it is without a doubt his most personal. Not only in how it’s heavily drawn from his own history, but also the unique way it understands childhood as only a director with a strong connection to their adolescence could. Because of this it’s also the directors’ most sentimental film, which has often been levied as a frequently unfair criticism against Spielberg in general. However those critics don’t seem to understand that there is a place for sentimentality, and...

Raiders of the Lost Ark , a tribute to the corny serial adventure films of the 1930s and 40s, would not have worked if it wasn’t self-aware. Above all, what makes it so thoroughly enjoyable and gratifying is that it’s smart enough to realize it’s transparently sensational, and has fun with that. That’s not to say it’s pure comedy -Spielberg knew better after  1941 . But it channels a kind of sincere silliness that you can’t help but be swept up in. You don’t take it seriously, yet you take it with awe. Birthed on a vacation with his close friend George Lucas in 1977 after both had ostensibly taken over Hollywood, Raiders of the Lost Ark  was the answer to Spielberg’s interest in making a Bond movie or action hero flick. The core of what would become Indiana Jones though, was Lucas’ idea, with the Ark of the Covenant element contributed by Philip Kaufman. The script would be written by Lucas’ reliable scribe of The Empire Strikes Back , Lawrence Kasdan, working closely w...

Not long before hitting theatres, a poster was released for the action movie Skyscraper  that in art style and design was an homage to the original poster for Die Hard ,   which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary the weekend Skyscraper  opened. And I have to applaud Skyscraper for the honesty in admitting directly with its poster that it was nothing more than a rehash of older better action movies, with only imitation to offer itself. Skyscraper is the first non-comedy film from director Rawson Marshall Thurber, and it definitely feels like it’s made by people who don’t know the genre they’re working in. Entirely driven by the gimmick of disaster, conspiracy, and danger taking place on the tallest building in the world, it’s not aware that this concept and the action set-pieces that result from it, aren’t at all original. Veteran FBI officer Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson) is hired as the security inspector for “The Pearl”, a recently unveiled record-breaking sky...

The Hotel Transylvania  movies are made for two audiences: children, and Genndy Tartakovsky fans. For my generation growing up, Tartakovsky was a big deal. The man pretty much single-handedly invented Cartoon Network in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, with shows like Dexter’s Laboratory , Samurai Jack , and the first Star Wars: Clone Wars  (he was also heavily involved in The Powerpuff Girls ). And it’s his unique style more than anything that has separated the Hotel Transylvania movies from other animated kids’ fare. The obnoxiously titled Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation makes the series a trilogy and breaks with the tradition of releasing these films around Halloween. Whether this effects its performance remains to be seen, but it certainly mixes up the premise and atmosphere. Count Dracula (Adam Sandler) is still running Hotel Transylvania, but mistaking his loneliness for stress, his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) arranges a cruise trip for the family and all ...

I think it’s time to talk about World War II. Steven Spielberg has, to say the least, a fascination with the Second World War, having set a number of his movies in that period, all of which critically comment on it to some degree or another. He’s called it “the most significant event of the last one hundred years” and as a baby boomer born only a year after the war ended, it would make sense that it would feel very close and constantly relevant to him. Movies are a great way to process complexities in the world, and the Second World War with its deep horrific history and behemoth impact, the reverberations of which are still felt today, is rife for analysis in cinema, and will continue to be for a long time. But 1941  was a curiously misguided place to start. Why did Spielberg make this movie? He feels passionately enough about the war to make something serious, so why did he go for a farce? Maybe he just wanted to see if he could, and Spielberg himself attests to being f...

I had a moment of clarity a few days before seeing it that I was anticipating going to a movie called Ant-Man and the Wasp . Twenty years ago that would’ve been the title of a 50s B-movie being riffed on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 . It says a lot about the dedication, power, and impact of Marvel that the twentieth film of their Cinematic Universe is the sequel to the movie about the shrinking superhero. It’s gotten to the point where they can make a concept work, regardless of how cheesy it sounds, not once, but twice. Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) has been under house arrest ever since joining Captain America’s team in Civil War , an action that has also made his former friends Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) fugitives. They reach out to him though when it becomes apparent he holds the key to rescuing Pym’s wife Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) from the subatomic quantum realm. As a tortured stealth agent (Hannah John-Kamen) tries to steal Pym’s technol...

Spielberg and aliens have an interesting history. While many other filmmakers working with alien stories were concerned with giving the extra-terrestrials a presence and purpose, Spielberg was much more taken with the mystery. Again hearkening to his curiosity with the enigma, his first alien story barely features aliens at all and is much more about their mystique, inspired by early sci-fi films in the vein of The Thing From Another World  and  It Came From Outer Space , as well as alleged alien encounters in rural America. Close Encounters of the Third Kind  was also the first movie (and one of only two) that Spielberg was the sole credited writer on. And certainly more than any other movie of his yet, this one provides insight into the kind of storytelling that drives him. It tells the story of an Indiana electrician Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), who sees a UFO on a job one night and subsequently becomes obsessed with learning more about the phenomenon. Along ...