Reviews of the Bosch

One of the few real bright spots in DreamWorks feature animation of the past decade has been the How to Train Your Dragon  franchise. Loosely based on the childrens’ novel series by Cressida Cowell and directed by Lilo & Stitch ’s Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, the 2010 boy-and-his-pet-story by way of Nordic fantasy and it’s 2014 sequel are a couple of the strongest American animated movies not to come out of Disney. Rich in both their world and characters and with a powerful, emotional backbone, they’re also technically innovative and breathtaking. The flight sequence from the first film is still one of the best scenes I’ve seen in ANY animated movie and the boldness and scope of the second remains uniquely impressive and captivating. How to Train Your Dragon 3 , or The Hidden World ,   has been a long time coming. The conclusion to the trilogy as DeBlois intended it to be, has been pushed back a number of times since its’ original release date was set in 2016. An...

If all publicity is good publicity than the 91 st  Academy Awards should have been the highest rated yet. Because in their desperation to draw in more audiences they made some truly baffling decisions that have caught the attention of the public and garnered heavy controversy. There was the stupid and condescending “Best Popular Film” debacle, Kevin Hart stepping down from the hosting gig amidst controversy surrounding homophobic jokes, the subsequent decision to do away with a host entirely this year for the first time since 1989, and the decision to cut four categories (Cinematography, Editing, Makeup & Hairstyling, and Live-Action Short) from the broadcast, only to restore them after near universal criticism from the film community on this move. Each of these proposed changes backfired drastically, making the Academy look like they either don’t know what they’re doing, or more depressingly, don’t actually care about celebrating film any more as much as appealing to...

It’s adorable what passed for political corruption in America in the 1940s. And the character of the corrupt. Even at his worst, Willie Stark at least has some intelligence, he remains at least a functioning human. The reality of All the King’s Men is a shade brighter than the reality of the United States in 2019. Checks and balances actually exist there, consequences exist there, and as far as we can tell Stark doesn’t directly enable white supremacy (although there aren’t any black people in the movie despite being set in 1940s Louisiana, so maybe). With the 91 st  Oscars happening tomorrow as far as we know, I’m once more looking back on a Best Picture winner of the past. And sixty-nine years ago, that highest honour went to Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men , a political film noir adapted from the popular novel by Robert Penn Warren about the rise of an outspoken idiot from a small county treasurer race to state governor through dishonesty, populism, rhetoric, and malfea...

I wish I had the confidence of Alita: Battle Angel . For a movie based on a manga (by Yukito Kishiro) that’s extremely obscure outside of Japan, it holds nothing back with regards to its intricate world, vast storytelling, and elaborate effects without a care for how it may translate. Whether or not you think it was a sound investment on 20 th  Century Fox’s part, every cent of its 170 million dollar budget is up on screen. This isn’t too surprising though coming from producer James Cameron, who has a history of investing heavily in risky projects. It is unusual for director Robert Rodriguez however, being by far the most expensive movie he’s ever made. How well does it pay off on quality though. American adaptations of manga and anime haven’t had much luck to put it mildly. For all it’s effort, does Alita: Battle Angel change the tide? Set in 2563, centuries after an apocalyptic event, Iron City exists as an insulated society built on the scrap heaps of a rich and mysteriou...

Vice  is a really unpleasant film. That’s the intent to some degree of course, but it doesn’t make it any more fulfilling to sit through. The movie is over two hours of a man reminding us how awful the Bush administration was and more specifically how bad a person Dick Cheney is. Adam McKay clearly wanted to make this movie for a long time, his mixture of hatred of and fascination with the former U.S. Vice President boiling over as though it had forcibly been repressed in the decade since he left office. But now McKay has let all of it out, venting, educating (I’m sure he believes), and breaking down the minutia of what made Cheney such a terrible and powerful political figure in admittedly creative and sometimes impressive ways. But there’s no constructive reason for this, there’s nothing meaningful McKay ultimately has to say with this satirical biopic. Told from the point-of-view of an Iraq war veteran (Jesse Plemons), the film chronicles the trajectory of the career of D...

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made one hundred and seven movies together during their iconic comedy partnership between 1921 and 1950. Though originally paired together by studio head Hal Roach, working together as much and as long as they did had to allow for a genuine friendship to flourish. That’s what Stan & Ollie  is all about as it recounts the duo’s last tour in the U.K. in 1953 to help secure funding for a film project. And it’s quite a sweet relationship to explore. In their sixties, Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (John C. Reilly) have come together for a series of vaudeville shows across the U.K. while writing and waiting for funding to come through on a film project: a Robin Hood parody. But dwindling audience interest and a mostly incompetent producer (Rufus Jones) takes a toll as Ollie struggles with health issues and Stan continues to hold a slight grudge against his partner for making a film without him on contractual obligation sixteen years e...

Five years later I’m still astonished The Lego Movie  was great. For a movie literally all about a specific product, seemingly as shallow and transparently manipulative a movie as it was possible to be, the fact that The Lego Movie  was not only good, but incredibly smart, visually compelling, terrifically funny, searingly satirical, and a poignant love letter to creativity above all, is downright miraculous. It really captured the spirit of imagination that Lego construction toys just happen to be a great vessel for. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part by merely existing asks if that lightning can strike twice, and it really can’t. Obviously it’s not as fresh or new or exciting as the original, but writers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (still basking in all the deserved acclaim for  Into the Spider-Verse ) realize this, and with director Mike Mitchell attempt to cull something different from the vast possibilities of this world while maintaining its sharpness. By a...

One of the earliest shots in Serenity  is of a man in a finely tailored suit standing on a beach holding a briefcase. He watches a fishing boat pull into harbour and then wades through the shallow water to get to it. It’s the kind of striking image that conjures memories of Lost , and this movie is quite a bit like Lost : a mess of plot points and character motivations that comes to no satisfactory end, but with a twist more outlandish and bizarre than even that show could ever conceive. Talking about Serenity  in a standard review is a tough task because so much of what makes this movie from writer-director Steven Knight so utterly baffling is in elaborate plot details and spoiler elements. To get to the meat of this movies’ severe structural and tonal problems requires discussing it in more depth than this type of short-form critique allows. But I especially want to avoid spoilers for this movie because I think people should absolutely see it. It is not going to be in...

A plot synopsis of  Destroyer , the new film from Girlfight  and Æ on Flux  director Karyn Kusama, reads like an extremely typical gritty cop movie. And while it does concede to a number of plot and character clichés, Destroyer is certainly not typical. While it isn’t exactly unique in its story, it is thoroughly engaging in its style and direction, but most importantly in its ambiguously moral and damaged lead character. Again, this isn’t indicative of the movies’ presentation, but Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman) is an extremely unorthodox LAPD officer who takes it upon herself to track down Silas (Toby Kebbell), a gang leader and bank robber whose organization she and her then partner Chris (Sebastian Stan) infiltrated nearly twenty years earlier. As she ruthlessly tries to ascertain his whereabouts and reflects on her time in his crew she also must deal with her estranged daughter Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn) who’s making increasingly dangerous and self-destructive choices...

James Baldwins’ If Beale Street Could Talk  is one of the seminal works of African-American literature. And yet I must admit I’d never heard of it until it was announced it was being made into a movie courtesy of Barry Jenkins, the writer and director of the Oscar winning Moonlight . It’s the kind of story you’d expect to be taught in schools alongside such luminaries as The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird . But of course both the U.S. and Canada have a general problem teaching non-white literature in schools, and hopefully the existence of this film might change that. Jenkins has pretty quickly set himself up as one of the great filmmakers of the 2010s. Not only is he keenly aware of and compelled by important social and racial issues, he addresses them in artistically fulfilling, emotionally resonant, and aesthetically beautiful ways unlike any other. As such Moonlight  was the best coming-of-age film of 2016, and  If Beale Street Could Talk  is by fa...

     Steven Spielberg directing Ready Player One is kind of like Stephen King writing an episode of Stranger Things . It’s just a little weird for a text that so passionately homages an individuals’ body of work to be interpreted by that individual. Ernest Cline is a Spielberg fanboy and his novel is centred around nostalgia for and celebrating a pop culture Spielberg had a heavy hand in creating. Certainly then it must have been a surreal experience for Cline. But I wonder if a reason Spielberg took on Ready Player One was once more an interest in self-reflection and self-examination. Most of the pop artefacts worshipped in the story, particularly the movie references, came about through developments in American cinema like the rise of blockbuster culture and the New Hollywood era that Spielberg, if not directly or indirectly responsible for, was on the ground level to witness. So perhaps its a reckoning that brought Spielberg on board; a desire to come to terms wi...