Reviews of the Bosch

I’ve never been fully aboard the Meryl Streep hype train. I’ve always felt she’s a really good actress of course, but her reputation as the greatest of her generation and one of the most important stars in Hollywood always felt a bit disingenuous at best, industry mandated at worst. I mean she’s an Academy darling, holding the record for the most nominations (21) of any actor by quite a lot, many of which even her most ardent admirers would admit were mere tokens. I’m not a fan of her kind of celebrity royalty and I just haven’t really been blown away by most of her performances that I’ve seen during my lifetime. But therein lies the rub, and I realize I actually haven’t seen much of her work of the 70s and 80s (or granted, The Devil Wears Prada for that matter), which is where the icon of Meryl Streep was born: the deeply committed, accent variant, self-challenging and arguably Oscar pursuant actress who was in fairly short order elevated to the esteem of Katherine Hepburn and

I Lost My Body  is yet another reminder that the most intrepid work in feature animation is being done outside of Hollywood; a deliriously attractive film that has no place amid the usual fodder turned out by studio animation divisions in the United States. It’s a French film, and France has a history of producing exquisitely unique animation from  The Triplets of Belleville , Ernest & Celestine , My Life as a Courgette ,  The Little Prince , Persepolis , Nocturna , and Long Way North , to of course the outright classics of Fantastic Planet  and Kirikou and the Sorceress . I Lost My Body  firmly joins their ranks, not only for its mesmerizing visuals and eccentric creativity, but because of its soulfulness, its tender exploration of loneliness and loss. Yet it’s a bit of a gruesome movie, more than most audiences are used to from animation at least, one half of its story following a disembodied hand escaping a lab and travelling the suburbs of Paris in a quest to find its bo

With COVID-19 being the only thing on anyones’ mind as it continues to spread and dominate every facet of life, its’ a relief to have a means of distraction in art and entertainment; and as much as I worry it’ll kill the theatre industry when this is all over, streaming is really a blessing during this time. There are so many options to turn to and so much content to occupy our thoughts and attentions that they can really make our home-bound existence more bearable. Most importantly, new stuff is still dropping there (though this too is impermanent). For my interests though, I first decided to check out the new Brett Haley movie on Netflix, All the Bright Places , based on the book by Jennifer Niven, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Liz Hannah. His follow-up to the astoundingly endearing Hearts Beat Loud , it’s a teenage romance set in Indiana about two kids starting a relationship as they each battle mental illness, that seems to be aiming to be something resembling a John

I, like everyone, have been thinking a lot about Coronavirus lately. The scope of its contagion and relative mortality rate sure, but likewise its’ social effects, economic effects, and probably most of all, cultural effects have me terribly concerned. Everything is at a seeming standstill; major events worldwide have been cancelled or postponed, as have numerous movies and film productions. No one of my generation has lived through a pandemic of this scale before, it’s terrifying and disheartening. A twenty-first century plague that we have little frame of reference for.  It was appropriate then, or possibly ominous, that just as the severity of this breakout became known, within a day of the first case being identified in my province, my latest order from the Criterion Collection arrived: including among a few other titles, The Seventh Seal –a movie set during the greatest plague of western history. That this would roughly coincide with the death of its star and acting legen

It’s sometimes difficult to remember why filmmakers keep returning to the well of Jane Austen …until the next Jane Austen adaptation comes along and sweeps us up. There’s just something innately interesting and endearing about the work, as far removed by both era and class as we may be from such stories and characters. Perhaps it is the charming Regency elegance paired with social, domestic, and economic critique, or her sharply drawn, compelling, immortal female protagonists like Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, and of course Emma Woodhouse; or it could just be that her romances are so incredibly likeable. Whatever the reason, it’s no particular mystery why in 2020, yet another Jane Austen movie has reached the big screen in the form of a new version of Emma  adapted by novelist Eleanor Catton and directed by acclaimed photographer and music video director Autumn de Wilde, in her feature debut. The film certainly shows the signs of having been made b

Since watching  Onward , I’ve been trying to decipher the meaning of its’ title. It doesn’t quite coalesce with any major themes of the film except in the basest sense of character and journey progression, nor is the word given any real significance in-text. I think I came to the conclusion it’s mostly a marketing name concocted by the brand executives at Disney, given they’re in the business lately of simple one-word titles for any animated features that aren’t sequels, but it’s declaratory function is still important and useful. Pixar isn’t the same company it once was. The bastion of strange, original concepts in family entertainment that shepherded the animated forms’ capacity for heartwarming values and artistic ambition in the United States has become mostly just another branch of the mainstream Disney behemoth in recent years. Most of their output in the 2010s have been sequels, with only three truly great additions to their canon ( Toy Story 3 , Inside Out , and Coco ) t

Clouds of Sils Maria  is a movie that simply gnaws at you. Its’ layered metatextual devices keep provoking new ideas and interpretation however you try and wrap your head around it. What is it really saying? What does it mean? Who are its’ characters, really? And yet it doesn’t aim to deliberately obfuscate the way movies its indebted to, such as Persona  or more obviously The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant  do. It definitely wants some clarity in what it is saying. Olivier Assayas’ 2014 film also owes a lot to the likes of  All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard  as it depicts a world-renowned French actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) returning to the play that launched her career. It is about the erotically charged relationship between a young and an older woman and how the former exploits the latter until she commits suicide. Maria had formerly played the girl Sigrid, and now in light of the playwrights’ death, has been talked into playing the elder Helena opposite a trouble

I refuse to believe that The Assistant , unofficially dubbed ‘the Weinstein movie’, came to a theatre near me at this point in time purely by chance. The film got its official limited release last fall, but it’s much timelier (and a little more welcome) now that the man and scandal it’s obviously-but-not-legally based on has gotten a resolution of sorts with Weinstein officially going to jail for his crimes. Of course The Assistant  is still a necessary movie, more now than ever, because in its extreme realism and miserable tone it proves to be way more than a movie about an abusive mogul. It arguably isn’t even about that to begin with. Writer-director Kitty Greens’ most fascinating choice is keeping her fictitious production head unseen and unnamed. Jane (Julia Garner) works just outside his office in a drab space with two other guys answering phones and making appointments on his behalf, occasionally having to endure the veracity of other movie executives or his wife; but the

“In solitude, I felt the liberty you spoke of. But I also felt your absence.” There’s a scene in  Portrait of a Lady on Fire , where Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) reads aloud from the Legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. The passage in question comes right at the end, when Orpheus, having the chance to return from the underworld with his deceased love, turns and look at her in defiance of Hades’ warning to the contrary -in so doing losing her forever. It prompts an in-scene debate about why Orpheus turned at the risk of his eternal love. “He chooses the memory of her,” asserts Marianne (Noémie Merlant). “He doesn’t make the lovers’ choice, but the poets’.” Still, Héloïse insists Orpheus could not help it, citing an audible farewell Eurydice gives him, “Perhaps she was the one who said ‘turn around’.” That Orphic theme returns throughout the film, to give context to the relationship between the engaged young noblewoman Héloïse and her portrait painter Marianne, during their brief time toge