Reviews of the Bosch

I was lucky enough to see Mirai , the latest film from animation master Mamoru Hosoda in a theatre -a small theatre, but a theatre nonetheless -the environment in which the film was clearly meant to be seen in. Like his other works it’s an obscenely visual movie, improving on previous effort Summer Wars  in its CG effects, and echoing  Wolf Children  and The Boy and the Beast  in its overwhelming beauty and its core theme of family. At the last Oscars, in one of the few good decisions made by the Academy this year, it became the first non-Studio Ghibli anime to be nominated; and while you could argue what other animes also deserved that recognition you can’t deny this one doesn’t, a sentimental yet chaotic portrait of a toddler’s relationship to his new infant sister. The film is about a young family in Yokohama living in a modernist home with a great tree in the courtyard. After the birth of their second child Mirai (which literally means “future”), older bro...

As much as the phrase is overused, you rarely see “perfect casting” in movies. It’s not often that an actor is cast in a part at just the right time that it’s apparent nobody could have performed it better. Even parts written for specific actors aren’t usually dependent on that person. However perfect casting does exist, and David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth  is a great example. Nobody could have played the role of the elusive and enigmatic alien at the centre of Nicolas Roeg’s sci-fi drama as precisely and uniquely as the already iconic, androgynous, unusual twenty-eight year old musical Starman. The Man Who Fell to Earth  is a captivating beast, not like any science-fiction movie I’ve ever seen. Sure it’s got a fair bit in common with visitor narratives like The Day the Earth Stood Still , but its style and feel is wholly its own. Screenwriter Paul Mayersberg and the late Nicolas Roeg adapted it from a book by Walter Tevis, but Roeg’s presentational and tonal c...

Certain media, if it hits you at the right time, has a way of impacting you in lasting, even formative ways. Perhaps it can help shape your sensibilities and your understanding of the world. Or maybe it can just revitalize your interest in a genre in a completely new way by showing you how dynamic that genre really is. There have been a handful of such media in my life, and one of them has been Futurama . Since discovering it,  I have seen T.V. animation that has been more challenging, more artistically impressive, and more revolutionary, but Futurama remains my personal favourite animated series. That’s not to say the show is without its’ feats of quality. Indeed, Futurama  is still one of the smartest comedy series I’ve ever seen and perhaps the most consistently creative. Its’ fans know just how quotable it is, and few sitcoms have earned their emotional peaks so well. Futurama  was already set in the future when it first aired on March 28 t...

Jordan Peele may well be the best horror director of the decade, and at the start of it you would never have guessed. He has a really particular feel for the genre, understanding both the importance and the technique of mood, tension, imagery, and performance that has made classics. Get Out  was an amazing debut, masking sharp racial satire and cogent social commentary in layers of harrowing suspense and mystique, and though Us  doesn’t top Peele’s Oscar-winning predecessor, it’s probably the best American horror film to come out since. After a traumatic experience as a child at a Santa Cruz Hall of Mirrors, Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) is returning to the area with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and their children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex), to spend the summer at their new beach house. But at night, four strangers show up and attack, revealed to be sinister doppelgängers of the family armed with scissors. The Wilsons are forced to fend for...

Mafia stories have become so entrenched in our popular culture that it’s sometimes hard to believe in their real-world roots. Watching Birds of Passage , an epic Columbian gangster movie directed by Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra, I frequently recalled the likes of The Godfather , The Sopranos , even Boardwalk Empire , seeing the mafia movie clichés play out and their character types making appearances. However this movie is based in real history, real figures, and a real drug war that consumed the Wayuu clans of northern Columbia for two decades. It’s easier to believe in movie tropes than in their real world progenitors. But it’s the crossroads of gangster culture and the Wayuu tradition that makes Birds of Passage  most compelling and distinct. The way it illustrates how each impacted the other and the lives that became changed and entangled in it is quite enrapturing. After two Wayuu families unite through marriage, the new young patriarch Rapayet Pushana (José ...

Wonder Park  is the kind of movie adults who dismiss animation would point to as evidence that it’s all mindless kids’ stuff. It’s also the kind of movie that would make many of my age bracket lament the heyday of the Disney Renaissance and how far animated film has fallen since. But don’t be fooled, Wonder Park  is not indicative of what modern animation is. For proof, check out The Lego Movie 2 or How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World  in neighbouring theatres. This movie’s just bad! It’s never a good sign if a movie has no credited director. Even “Alan Smithee” implies someone  was overseeing the project. But the director of Wonder Park  was fired midway through production over sexual harassment allegations, and the producers finished the job without crediting anyone. This however I don’t believe would have made a difference in the films’ overall quality. It was merely a portent of doom. This is a movie that doesn’t even get the name of its own pa...

There have been a hundred thrillers like Greta . Stories about dangerous obsessives and psychological manipulation reliant on plot misdirects and suspense over character and genuine horror. Watching this new film from The Crying Game  and Interview with a Vampire  director Neil Jordan, I was often reminded of movies like Vertigo , Cape Fear , One Hour Photo , and Misery . In the shadow of these and many others,  Greta struggles with finding its own identity, though it does make some valiant attempts. A young New York waitress, Frances McCullen (Chloe Grace Moretz) finds an abandoned purse on the subway. She returns it to its owner, a lonely French widow Greta Hideg (Isabelle Huppert), and the two strike up an unconventional friendship. However Frances soon discovers a deeply disturbing side of Greta and in her attempt to cut ties, only fuels Greta’s crazed obsession and stalker tendencies towards her. Beneath its’ intense exterior, Greta  is a movie about lo...

It’s really silly that the WWE has a film production company. It’s main goal seems to be producing (or more often co-producing) movies that either feature a famous wrestler or are in some way significantly related to the world of professional wrestling. Most of their output had been straight-to-video and the few theatrical releases they have been involved with have been terrible movies (apart from the seriously random outlier of Oculus ). I say this because the biopic Fighting With My Family , which they co-produced with a half dozen other studios but is heavily self-promotional, is the first good movie their name’s been plastered over. It’s the true story of Saraya Knight a.k.a. Paige (Florence Pugh) and her brother Zak (Jack Lowden) who grow up in Norwich, England aspiring to be professional wrestlers, encouraged by their wrestling obsessed parents Ricky (Nick Frost) and Julia (Lena Headey), with whom they run a local independent club and training centre. The two secure a Lond...

If you’re lucky enough to have avoided the “discourse” surrounding Captain Marvel  ahead of its release, I envy you. Because of it being a female-led superhero movie and star Brie Larson’s outspoken criticism of institutional sexism in Hollywood and particularly the lack of women and minority film critics (both genuine problems I find it hard to disagree with), Captain Marvel  has incurred the wrath of basement dwellers everywhere -down-voting the movie en masse on Rotten Tomatoes before it was released and even attempting a feeble, though annoying, boycott. With the movie closing its opening weekend as the highest earning debut of a single-hero Marvel film after Black Panther , it would seem to have already vanquished the organized hate campaign and bad-faith criticism, but those forces are still loud and unyielding. But Captain Marvel , like its title character, doesn’t have to prove itself to them; it stands on its own merits. Vers (Brie Larson) is a skilled soldier ...