Reviews of the Bosch

Perhaps the film that most defined the career of Joan Crawford, at least from the 1940s on, and how she’s popularly remembered, was Mildred Pierce . This was the film that won her her only Oscar and is still considered a high point of both the film noir and womens’ picture genres that dominated the 1940s. It was her favourite performance and is generally considered to be one of her best. A movie not quite like anything else that Hollywood was producing at the time, which I seem to say a lot, but is particularly true in this case if for no other reason than the sheer power it gives its’ women. The protagonist of the movie is an ambitious yet well-meaning forty year old woman, the antagonist is her insolent, deceptive teenage daughter. Director Michael Curtiz didn’t want Crawford to play the title role initially, preferring someone like Barbara Stanwyck; and yet it’s clear nobody else could have played this part, she makes it completely her own. This was coming off of a two year hiatus f...

When I think back to the early 2010s a series of cultural touchstones come to mind. Obama of course, the recession, Occupy Wall Street, the Vancouver and London Riots, the Twilight  movies, Taylor Swift …and Community . Obviously one of these things is not the like the others, and doesn’t carry with it nearly as much cultural cache, but the cult NBC comedy that ran from 2009 to 2015 never fails to evoke for me that period of time that seems so long ago now and in another reality -where the world hadn’t lost its’ mind, we all had a kind of bright optimism in life, and references to the short-lived superhero series The Cape  were perfectly relevant. Of course it could just be it brings to mind my university years, which more or less coincided with the run of Community , and was when I first discovered and fell in love with the show. I mean it is a series that is set at and about a school -it’s not like it was difficult to relate to. But it wasn’t a show that really dwelt much on...

In 1971, the notorious critic Pauline Kael published an essay in the New Yorker entitled “Raising Kane”, which examined the original shooting script of Citizen Kane  and alleged that the film that had come to be popularly regarded as the greatest movie of all time, owed more to the efforts of Herman J. Mankiewicz, the scripts’ credited co-author, than Orson Welles. It caused a great controversy in the film community and though many of Kaels’ claims were debunked, it remains an important piece of film academia, and if nothing else has restored Mankiewicz’s name to the discussion surrounding that movie, long dominated by the ever-imposing figure of Welles as its sole creative auteur. And I have to wonder if David Fincher, or indeed his late father Jack, had been a fan of this essay. Mank  is definitely a film Pauline Kael would have appreciated, and I believe so would Mankiewicz himself, who bore a grudge against Welles on the credit for the film for the rest of his life. It cer...

  The basic premise for Freaky  is dumb, and if it had to exist it should have been fifteen years ago. And that’s not just because that would put it closer in time to the 2003 Freaky Friday  remake, still the most popular version of the body-switch narrative on film in defiance of all odds and the existence of Your Name ; but because the movie is to its core an early 2000s comedy, with all the same conventions in the script and direction, the comedy and plot contrivances, as well as character archetypes that may have even been outdated then -or are American schools really that cartoonishly cliquey?. In any case, as much as Freaky distinctly belongs to another time, it’s not chasing a relevant trend of body-switching movies or nostalgia, but rather a particular kind of gimmick-based horror comedy most obviously epitomized in the surprisingly successful time loop flick Happy Death Day . That films’ director, Christopher Landon, is behind Freaky  as well, and it too is ...

I can’t help but speculate that it’s not a coincidence both Amy Adams and Glenn Close, actresses long courted by the Academy, but never recipients of any prize (yes, Glenn Close has never won an Oscar!), signed on to a movie like Hillbilly Elegy . It’s perfect awards season bait, a film based on a bestselling memoir, directed by the Oscar-winning Ron Howard, and offering both actresses the opportunity show off their range as larger than life characters in a very unsophisticated (i.e. transformative) context. It’s the kind of thing that has paid off for other actors before, so I get why they’re in it. But that doesn’t make it any less sad to see them. Hillbilly Elegy is a bad movie, and it’s not very surprising that it’s a bad movie. The book its’ based on by J.D. Vance is supposedly an autobiographical chronicle of a childhood in rural Kentucky, coloured by family dysfunction and “Appalachian values” mixed in with social commentary on the state of white poverty in the United States. Na...

It might be time to retire the period lesbian romantic drama. No doubt this cinematic subgenre that has arisen in recent years centering on forbidden romances between women in less enlightened times has produced great movies, among them Todd Haynes’ exceptional Carol and Park Chan-wook’s thrilling The Handmaiden . But at the same time it’s gotten tedious and in short order become just another clich é  of movies vaguely trying to be Oscar-bait. And of course they almost always star heterosexual women in the homosexual roles: Vita & Virginia , Tell It to the Bees , Wild Nights with Emily , Colette , and most recently Summerland . Kira Deshler wrote a great article for Screen Queens on this phenomenon and why it’s become tiresome. And personally I believe the genre clearly hit its apex with Portrait of a Lady on Fire  -no lesbian period drama can follow that and compare. Unfortunately, Ammonite  has no choice but to follow it, and so from the start it’s an uphill battle...