Reviews of the Bosch

It’s been forty years since John Carpenter’s Halloween popularized a new genre of horror film: the slasher movie. The story of a psychotic killer terrorizing teenagers in a suburban neighbourhood on Halloween night inspired numerous movies that followed, formulas and clichés that would come to be staples of horror, and immortalized the foreboding Michael Myers as probably the best villain of the popular slasher franchises. But being the first didn’t save Halloween  from falling into the traps, patterns, and lunacies of every slasher series. While the first couple sequels may be admirable for their experimentation if nothing else (Myers and any other connective tissue is completely absent from the third movie for example), none that followed were in any way good, including the two films of Rob Zombie’s ill-fated reboot. This new Halloween  though, released in time for the fortieth anniversary of the original, did something very smart in stripping all but the first movie ...

I’ve never seen a giallo horror movie before, but if Dario Argento’s Suspiria  is anything to go by, it’s probably not a genre I’d like all that much. This movie is interesting, a near even mix of Italian exploitation and New Hollywood thriller in its style and influence; it’s pretty in its lush production design and vivid use of colour; but its story is rather weak, its characters sadly flat, the performances even more so, and the scares, creative and memorable though they are, are much more aesthetically noteworthy than actually scary. Jessica Harper stars as Suzy Bannion, an American ballet student coming to study at the prestigious Tanz Dance Academy in Freiburg, Germany. But a series of gruesome murders targeting people connected with the school disturbs her and the other students, eventually proving to be a conspiracy linked to the secret history of the school itself. Giallo is a sub-genre characterized by murder-mysteries, often incorporating elements of ...

I must assume “Arachnids in the U.K.” wasn’t a fun time for fans with arachnophobia. And it isn’t the first time the Doctor has been up against giant spiders. In fact it was in defeating the Metebelis Eight-Legs that brought about the death of her Third incarnation in the classic “Planet of the Spiders”. Ten regenerations later, it would make sense for her not to be too keen on them. Abnormally large spiders have been turning up around Sheffield, killing and cocooning people in webs when the Doctor and friends return. Upon further investigation, the Doctor is led to a luxury hotel run by a callous American businessman who had just that day fired Yaz’s mum Najia. There the gang discover the source of these anomalies and set about to contain the spiders before any more damage and death can result. The story is pretty decent, with plenty of the expected investigation through strange and dark environments broken up by the occasional monster attack and the Doctor formulating a plan...

Let’s talk a little about Stanley Kubrick. He was one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived (he was also kind of a giant asshole, but that’s not relevant). He thrived on pushing cinematic boundaries, arguably more so than any Hollywood director of the twentieth century, from Lolita  to Dr. Strangelove , A Clockwork Orange , to The Shining , and of course his most influential work 2001: A Space Odyssey . An auteur filmmaker, he exercised an enormous amount of control over most aspects of his films, and didn’t really seem to care if an audience accepted them or not. Thematically many of his films are known for their contemplative pessimism and dark realism, supported by his uniquely moody art direction, cinematography, and editing. So it seems unusual that he would have much in common with Steven Spielberg, a director who idolized him, but whose work was more often than not, fantastical, sentimental, crowd-pleasing, and life affirming. However the two managed to strike up a...

There’s a lot of character and a lot of mystique to Drew Goddard’s slick and stylish neo-noir, Bad Times at the El Royale . A 70’s-set ensemble crime film, it’s got a lot of the same cleverness to it as Goddard’s previous directorial effort, Cabin in the Woods , missing only the flourish and wit of a Joss Whedon script. But Goddard’s an accomplished screenwriter himself, and though clearly a better writer of plot than character, still manages to craft a mostly intriguing, intense, and fun thriller. Four strangers: a soul singer (Cynthia Erivo), an old priest (Jeff Bridges), a vacuum cleaner salesman (Jon Hamm), and an abrasive young hippie (Dakota Johnson) check into the El Royale, a once luxurious hotel built on the border of California and Nevada, which has fallen into disrepair. Its’ sole employee is a nervous young clerk (Lewis Pullman) who checks them into their rooms. But each guest is hiding something, and as secrets unravel and stakes escalate it becomes a question of wh...

A few years ago I highlighted Five Hidden Halloween Gems  that go relatively unappreciated in discussions of the great movies to watch at the spookiest time of the year. Overlooked both among the horror classics and the contemporary triumphs of the genre, they’re still movies I highly recommend finding and watching. And as it happens, there are more than five; so here are five more. Each of these are exceptional, creative, indelible, and often more genuinely scary than your standard jump scare-fest or cheap slasher sequel. 5.   Shadow of the Vampire  is a bizarre movie to say the least. It’s a fictional history of the making of F.W. Murnau’s classic unlicensed Dracula  adaptation, Nosferatu . The film posits that Max Schreck, the actor playing Count Orlock, was in fact a real vampire hired by Murnau to make the film as authentic as possible, and portrays how Schreck haunts and preys upon the people involved in the production. The movie is definitely a...

Since Doctor Who ’s surge of popularity in America and especially since Steven Moffat took the show there for the first time in his second year in charge, the writers have gotten more comfortable with American-set stories. And it’s opened up a lot of opportunities and spared us having to listen to fake American accents as bad as in “The Gunfighters”. Doctor Who  right now also seems to be on a mission to drive away the trolls in the fandom with greater progressive attitudes and a stronger push for diversity. “Rosa” (which is one letter off from the revived series’ pilot) is certainly an encapsulation of both of those ambitions for the show. Episodes like these serve a purpose, but the message could be conveyed flimsily very easy. However in producing episodes like “Rosa”, at least Doctor Who is pissing off the right people. In one of many attempts to gain control of the TARDIS and get back to Sheffield, the Doctor and friends wind up in Montgomery, Alabama 1955 where they me...

For all of Spielberg’s fascination with the Second World War going back to his earliest days as a filmmaker, it took him until 1998 to actually make a war film. The  Indiana Jones  movies are really an action-adventure series more than anything else, 1941  is a comedy on the home front, Always could have been a war movie but was updated, and Empire of the Sun  and Schindler’s List are personal and social dramas set against the war. Spielberg hadn’t actually made a movie about the war; about the battles and strategies, the experience of fighting, and the physical and mental toll it takes on soldiers in the midst of it. But it’s pretty clear he’d always wanted to make one, and being Spielberg, it had to be one different from the generic John Wayne, Henry Fonda, or Lee Marvin vehicles pumped out in the 50’s and 60’s. And he saw that ideal war movie in the script for Saving Private Ryan . Though not an adaptation, it’s loosely inspired by a true story: that of th...

  I’ll be honest, I was a little disappointed when I heard that the next movie directed by Damien Chazelle was going to be a biopic on Neil Armstrong and the Moon Landing. As monumental a story as that is, I couldn’t help feel it was a big step down creatively from the sensational and technical brilliance of Whiplash  and especially La La Land that made Chazelle one of the most promising filmmakers in Hollywood and the youngest Oscar-winning director. I underestimated Chazelle however, as though the story obviously isn’t original, the approach to this movie certainly is. A character study as much as a chronicle of the various attempts by NASA during the 1960s to get ahead of the Russians in the space race, the movie follows an introverted but skilled pilot Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), who joins NASA’s astronaut program after the tragic death of his daughter. As he takes part in various tests and missions, culminating in the inaugural lunar expedition, his wife Janet...