Reviews of the Bosch

The Ladykillers  was one of the last of the Ealing comedies, a series of movies produced by Michael Balcon in London’s Ealing Studios during the late 1940s through the 50s, directed by folks like Charles Crichton, Alexander Mackendrick, and Robert Hamer, and often starring Alec Guinness. Similar in tone and style, they were a landmark of British comedy on film, influencing later movies (including A Fish Called Wanda , the last film Crichton directed) and a number of British sitcoms and sketch shows. For its unique, dark plot and characters, The Ladykillers  is one of the most famous of these films, alongside Kind Hearts and Coronets  and The Lavender Hill Mob . It was directed by Mackendrick, starred Guinness, and was written by William Rose who claims to have dreamed up the whole story from start to finish, earning an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA win for it. It’s about a sweet but eccentric old woman Mrs. Louisa Wilberforce (Katie Johnson) who unknowingly rents ou...

It’s been five years since Steve McQueen’s last movie, 12 Years a Slave , won three Oscars including Best Picture, and so naturally movie fans have been wondering what his next project would be for years. Would it be a smaller scale drama like his earlier movies Hunger  and Shame , or would it be something even more ambitious? Widows  is neither. It’s a heist movie, but one taken incredibly seriously, something that seems alien to a genre that’s become synonymous with the likes of Steven Soderbergh Ocean’s  movies or light-hearted caper films like The Italian Job , How to Steal a Million , or of course, The Great Muppet Caper . But this is a genre that’s also included The Asphalt Jungle  and Dog Day Afternoon . Widows  is aiming to be something more along those lines. The movie is centred on the widows of a group of criminals in Chicago who are killed following a botched robbery of a corrupt politician Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry) running for alderma...

For most of its history, sequels haven’t really been Disney’s thing -not high quality, theatrical animated canon ones at least. Ralph Breaks the Internet  (which ought to be called Ralph Wrecks the Internet ) is only their third after The Rescuers Down Under  ( the studio’s single most underrated gem ) and Fantasia 2000  ( which contains some of their best ever animation ). The arcade game world and creative premise of Wreck-It Ralph  actually did offer a lot of opportunity for a follow-up though, and I was really looking forward to what a sequel would do. Going to the internet wasn’t what I expected, but I remained optimistic even while the trailers for this movie were pretty insufferable, emphasizing mostly the shameless Disney Princess scene. Luckily, the movie is not as bad as the trailers, but it does have some bugs. Craving something new from her game, Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman) is delighted when Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly) creates a ne...

How wasn’t this a Halloween episode? In both its title and content, “The Witchfinders” immediately conjures the absurdity of Monty Python and the Holy Grail or (for me) the “Witchsmeller Pursuivant” episode of Blackadder . We’re not attuned to taking witch hunting seriously, but very quickly this episode upends that. It very vividly emphasizes that this practice was real and barbaric and motivated out of a misplaced sense of religious righteousness. And once again it’s a topic Doctor Who  really hasn’t touched on before. Witches have shown up in one way or another in stories like “The Daemons” and “The Shakespeare Code”, but this is the first time witch trials have been properly addressed and the episodes’ handling of it does not disappoint. The TARDIS en route to the coronation of Elizabeth I ends up in seventeenth century Lancashire, where a local landowner is having near weekly witch duckings for the village. After failing to save one victim the Doctor sets herself up...

       In a way it makes sense to do War of the Worlds as a disaster movie. H.G. Wells’ classic science-fiction novel after all inspired the alien invasion subgenre of the sci-fi B-movie age which in turn inspired the quintessential film of the disaster genre, Independence Day . And the book itself bears a number of the same story elements including a gradual build in tension, bland human characters, and of course, the mass destruction of urban centres. The War of the Worlds holds an interesting place of reverence for film fans. The 1953 American adaption is considered by some to be a genre classic with its ground-breaking special effects and Cold War subtext. And of course there’s the infamous 1938 radio presentation that helped launch the career of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre Company, and is said to have caused mass panic due to its experimental news bulletin presentation style.        Enter Steven Spielberg after a couple relat...

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them  was a mediocre movie that expanded on the universe of Harry Potter  in some interesting ways with generally engaging new characters who offered a refreshing take, while being let down by terrible visual effects and an inorganic subplot that was mostly set-up for future movies and lore. However after seeing its sequel, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald , I find myself thinking back nostalgically to that movie of two years ago as something quite great by comparison. It’s not until seeing the potential squandered, that I realize what was really there. The Crimes of Grindelwald  is a very bad movie. The worst this franchise has spawned since The Half-Blood Prince . Just like it, The Crimes of Grindelwald  has little plot of its own that’s not just setting up another movie, and what plot it does have is bafflingly dumb, convoluted, problematic, or a mixture of all three. After capture at the end of the last movie...

Hollywood really seems to hate Dr. Seuss. Beginning with the first live-action adaptation of one of his classic stories, the 2000 Ron Howard directed Jim Carrey mess How the Grinch Stole Christmas? , Hollywood has consistently demonstrated a fundamental inability to respect Dr. Seuss and give his stories even a half-decent film treatment. Chuck Jones proved fifty-two years ago how the animation format was the best way to translate Seuss’ stories, but even in that format, versions of Horton Hears a Who  and The Lorax have been dreadful. And now that same studio Illumination is delivering their take on The Grinch , one that like the Ron Howard movie before it, seems unaware of the irony of excessively promoting a story about how Christmas means more than material things while merchandising the hell out of that story. But even putting its obnoxious marketing aside, The Grinch is one of the worst movies I’ve sat through this year. Its’ mostly book-accurate visual aesthetic and ...

It’s incredibly timely that just as Amazon opens a new headquarters in New York to quite a bit of controversy, Doctor Who presents an episode that’s largely a fierce satire of Amazon, right down to the very reason for the current outrage. It’s an episode that ultimately revolves around dissatisfaction with automation and minimizing jobs, which is very curious and coincidental. I’m not saying that the soulless intergalactic delivery company that serves as the title of this episode is where the largest online retail conglomerate in operation today is headed, but it wouldn’t surprise me if something like it was in their ten-year plan. Apart from this little bit of commentary though, “Kerblam!” is an above average episode for an interesting issue it tackles maturely, some good performances and humour, and a perfectly fine mystery by Doctor Who  standards that subverts expectations. But its momentum is often shaky and the stakes aren’t all that compelling. Also the evil plan hing...

       Another movie that’s probably often forgotten in Steven Spielberg’s repertoire is his 2004 feel-good character dramedy The Terminal . And like Always , I can understand why. It is certainly unremarkable, regurgitating a story structure and themes that have been conveyed and perfected in many other movies from as diverse filmmakers as Frank Capra, Yasujiro Ozu, and Jacques Tati. But on the other hand, there is something genuinely nice and even a little bit heartwarming to this story of a man confined to an airport and the ways he changes peoples’ lives that I think warrants a little more recognition than it gets.         The Terminal is actually loosely inspired by the real case of Mehran Karimi Nasseri who spent eighteen years in the Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport after ending up stateless as an individual who couldn’t legally enter France or return home to Iran. However the movie really just borrows the concept of such a bizarre bur...