Reviews of the Bosch

So after last month watching and greatly disappointing the fans of Sophie’s Choice , here I am back again in 1982 for what was probably that films’ greatest awards competitor, Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi . Gandhi  is of course quite a different movie to Sophie’s Choice , yet it is just as much a standard sort of Oscar bait-y film: the biographic epic. It’s easy to attach cynicism to the movie then, but it was also very much a labour of love. Attenborough had been trying to get it made for some twenty years, only for it to repeatedly be set back by numerous production and political factors. But he was finally able to bring the project to fruition thanks in large part to generous financing from the National Film Development Corporation of India. That detail is not insignificant, and though it resulted in the movie being made and at an epic scale befitting the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, it also obviously raises questions about conflicts of interest. Gandhi is after all arguabl...

“The valley was full of shouting, howling creatures, and every soul was shrieking, ‘Not a god nor a devil but only a man!’” -Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King Petty Asshole       In 1994, still relatively fresh off of their hit   Aladdin , screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio were approached by then Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg about writing a movie set during the Age of Discovery. He was particularly interested in the world of early Spanish America, giving the writers Hugh Thomas’ Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes and the Fall of Old Mexico  as a guideline. Katzenberg envisioned it as a kind of grand historical epic on par with the then also in early development Prince of Egypt , more akin to Aguirre the Wrath of God  than a classical Disney-style fairy tale -and would help kick off his new studio DreamWorks Animation with a loud and distinct bang. Instead, Elliott and Rossio wrote it as an homage to the old Hollywood Bin...

Bacurau is an old village in the Brazilian sertão (the outback). Its’ village matriarch has just died and her granddaughter Teresa (Bárbara Colen) has just returned from the outside world. The whole area exists in a simple, serene, traditional and humble lifestyle. But the town is neglected by the government. There is little phone coverage, basic foods, water, and materials arrive on an irregular schedule, their local government rep doesn’t respect them much, and the infrastructure is falling into disrepair. And then the village mysteriously disappears off of maps and GPS systems and it becomes apparent to those villagers something very hostile is at work. Bacurau  is written and directed by Kleber Mendoça Filho and Juliano Dornelles as a scathing indictment on the Brazilian governments’ treatment of such secluded communities. And it’s certainly a critique that has an international resonance. I know in Canada for instance, we constantly have to account for similar severe iss...

Sergio  is the narrative film debut of journalist and documentarian Greg Barker, best known as a director of political and foreign policy docs such as Manhunt  and The Final Year . The film is in fact based on his earlier movie, also called Sergio , about the career of U.N. diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello,  a figure Barker is clearly very fascinated by to devote both an objective and subjective feature to his international work, both leading up to his death in Baghdad in the 2003 Canal Hotel bombing. Certainly the man was an interesting figure, who devoted his work and risked his life to efforts to bring peace to the Middle East, but this film doesn’t convey that as aptly as it should, Barker perhaps having exhausted the telling of that story to focus more intently on the mans’ personal life. Narcos ’ Wagner Maura plays the Brazilian title figure, aged down about a decade, and the film in a very documentary style introduces the defining dramatic moment (the bo...

It’s not until about the twenty minute mark of Never Rarely Sometimes Always , about a week after Autumn Callahan (Sidney Flanigan) discovers she’s pregnant, that the inevitable “A” word comes up, and it’s used very sparingly even afterwards. Abortion is a taboo subject in her small Pennsylvanian town, and the shame of undergoing the procedure would be overwhelming -if she was allowed it at all. None of this is outright stated, in fact the film is extremely subdued, the introverted Autumn not speaking much, even when alone with her best friend. But it’s all unquestionably true by the imagery, body language, and attitude of the place. This is not a community comfortable in the twenty-first century. So Autumn has to go elsewhere. Never Rarely Sometimes Always  is a stupendous film, the third feature from indie darling filmmaker Eliza Hittman. In some ways it’s quite reminiscent of Jasmin Mozaffari’s Firecrackers , in that it too follows a pair of girls wanting to escape their ...

Parts of Tigertail , a new drama from Parks and Recreation  director Alan Yang, seriously reminded me of the  Apu  trilogy, that bastion of world cinema and pretentious referential point for film nerds such as myself. Much like those films, it presents various stages in the life of a man often by contextualizing them through his relationships to the significant women of that life: his grandmother, mother, first love, wife, and daughter specifically -and how each of them impacted his identity, worldview, and choices in crucial ways. But we don’t see these relationships entirely sequentially, the film rather grazes through time from the vantage point of the present; and the point of view of a man whose severe emotional hollowness masks deep regrets and heavy failings. Long before it came to Netflix, I first heard of Tigertail through Lulu Wang championing it on Twitter. The endorsement from the director of The Farewell , one of my favourite movies last year, not only...