Reviews of the Bosch

Of all the Hitchcock movies that have resonance in 2019, the one about a woman fearing for her well-being in her relationship with a man might be the most so. The capacity for men to inflict violence or the threat of violence on women has remained a harsh reality, as has the prevalence of bad men putting on an appearance of consideration and kindness -so 1941’s Suspicion  has certainly aged well in that regard. But of course the movie is about more than Lina McLainlaw’s (Joan Fontaine) anxiety over whether her charismatic but highly mysterious new husband Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant) is planning to kill her. The suspicion of the title refers likewise to his façade of responsibility, con-man tactics, and how they seem to inextricably point to Johnnie being a gold digger, Lina having a very wealthy father, and not actually loving her the way he claims. Hitchcock’s moniker, “the Master of Suspense” may seem a hyperbole to some, but it's movies like this that made him earn it.

“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue; and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” I don’t think I’ve sat down and watched The Wizard of Oz  in more than fifteen years. Among the first things I noticed doing so now in 2019, nearly eighty years to the day of its original release on August 25th, 1939, was the amount of obvious foreshadowing in the first twenty minutes. The farmhands are each equated with their later analogues through blatant metaphors and personality quirks (Huck’s “head made out of straw” comment), Professor Marvel is clearly a fraud in spite of his good nature, Dorothy at one point straight up calls Miss Gulch a “wicked old witch”. We don’t notice these things watching the film as children, or maybe we do and reason that it doesn’t matter. It still doesn’t matter. Despite being the part of the movie we’re not supposed to care about, the portrait of a dreary Kansas bedighted by one instant icon of a song, those opening scenes are extrao

It’s been twenty years since Fight Club and there are loads of people who still don’t understand what it’s actually about -those who see it as a mere psychological thriller, or worse a justifiable encapsulation of rage against the system, rather than the dark cautionary tale it is. Which is understandable given how the intended text of the film and the aesthetics are rarely compatible. It’s the story of one man channelling his mediocrity into brutish violence, fascist ideology, and domestic terrorism, but through David Fincher’s stylish direction, composition, cinematography, etc., these things are made to look cool and tough and smart and appealing so that the point is easily misconstrued. It did after all directly inspire real unironic fight clubs and a number of terrorist acts. I’m not here to break down Fight Club  though ( Maggie Mae Fish already did that expertly ), but to look at its latest descendent, a film that knows exactly what it’s about and makes no attempt to appear

Art holds substantial power over us and it often goes unvalued the sheer degree of its impact. The right book or movie or piece of music that hits us at the right time can have a domino effect that changes what we do with our lives. How often have we heard scientists or astronauts or engineers say they were driven to their fields by Star Trek  -it’s become a cliché. Law enforcement and military personnel have similarly cited superhero comics as a profound inspiration for choosing vocations of justice and courage. Every filmmaker has that one movie they saw when they were young that lit the spark. And speaking of sparks… Blinded by the Light is 2019’s second love letter to a specific musical icon starring a British-Asian character struggling to find himself that balances comedy with personal drama. However it’s a much more sincere film than Danny Boyle’s Yesterday , if not as witty or interesting on a conceptual level. It’s the latest film from Gurinder Chadha, the often forgotte

Samiramis Kia, winner of the Best Canadian Short Film Award for her movie MILK        I've never walked a Red Carpet before.        It's not too special; you have to duck around people taking photos lest you wind up some intrusion in their otherwise happy memory, and the carpet is just a carpet. Not to mention in this specific case, the Casino Regina Show Lounge isn't the ideal place for one, lacking sufficient space for a Hollywood-style runway. It still felt special though, but what was at the end of it was the real treat.        There were maybe a couple dozen people in the reception area when I arrived. An hour later, shortly before the Awards Ceremony was due to start the place was packed. Every sponsor and financier, program coordinators, volunteers, and festival directors were there, as were of course the directors, producers, even stars of the nominated movies and their families. As a humble small-time critic I very much felt like I'd won the Golden Tic

Eva Löbau's Alice anxiously awaits an interview in  The Chairs Game        The great bragging rights of attending a film festival is getting to see movies, sometimes great movies, before the rest of the world. I know I’m envious of the lucky folks at Cannes who have already seen Bong Joon-ho’s Parasites , Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire , or Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse . And on the fourth day of RIFFA I felt at least a sampling of that kind of privilege. At last I got to see a couple narrative features from little-known international directors that probably won’t ultimately be seen by a substantial audience. And that is a great shame. Rafiki  was such a film, which I saw earlier this year, and is still one of my favourites. But the least I can do is tell people about these movies. Crush My Heart  is an interesting one. An Austrian movie about a Romeo & Juliet kind of romance that forms between two teenagers trapped in the grips of a Romani mob. It’s the f

If you open up Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark  to just about any page, you’ll be confronted with a surreal and haunting illustration from Stephen Gammell, arguably too unnerving for the books’ target audience of children. These sketches more than the stories themselves (often already repurposed from folklore and urban legends), with their colourless depth, stylized shadows, vividly perverted features, and crude textures implying a deranged originator really have a way of sticking in the recesses of ones’ mind waiting to surface all of a sudden in some nightmare. I would venture to guess that such eldritch horror imagery is what captivated Guillermo del Toro, always a fan of the macabre. The resulting movie of this fascination, also called  Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark , on which del Toro has a producing and story credit and is directed by André Øvredal, certainly acquiesces to the frightfulness of the books’ monster designs. Though never as effective in

Klaus Eder talking film criticism with moderator Dilani Rabindran        If there was a theme to the Third Day of RIFFA it's that the current state of affairs is bad. Whether it be personal technology, modern cinema, or the physical world as we've remade it, in the old vs. new debate the old was winning out, or at least being more vehemently argued for, while the problems in modernity were being spotlighted.        Obviously such generalities are flawed though, and that's demonstrated by my first real disappointment of the festival.  Selfless  is a film that’s equal parts documentary, sermon, and Terrence Malick movie as it examines modern technology and social media dependence, on which it blames most problems facing today’s teenagers. It doesn’t seem to understand the neutrality of technology and social media though, that they’re only symptoms of much larger social and cultural institutions that don’t go away when you turn off your phone. Nor can the film grasp t