Reviews of the Bosch

There’s a point in The White Tiger , where Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav), after a major and dramatic wake-up call in his career as a driver for a wealthy family, laments on the state of being poor in India. In voice-over narration he comments, “I was trapped in the rooster coop, and don’t believe for a second there’s a million-rupee game show you can win to get out of it.” This isn’t the only time the movie dispels the somewhat romanticized portrait of Indian wealth inequity exported by the likes of Slumdog Millionaire , but it is the most direct. For Balram, who knows the rigidity of the caste system very well, below a certain wealth threshold it is a torturous life with few prospects; and he will do whatever it takes to keep from sinking back into it. The White Tiger  is based on the novel by Arvind Adiga, a dark satire on the Indian caste system in the twenty-first century, a story that starts out like Great Expectations , but ultimately turns into The Godfather  by way of Parasite

Al Pacino and Robert De Niro had been friends for decades, but they had never shared the screen together until  Heat . Yeah, they were both in The Godfather Part II , where De Niro won his first Oscar, but as characters separated by several decades they never crossed paths. It took fifteen years after the end of the decade they both dominated for them to actually meet on screen for a gritty Michael Mann crime drama about an extremely clever career criminal and the obsessed LAPD officer determined to take him down. Heat  is one of those movies that has an incredibly high reputation in certain film circles that I’ve known about for years. For some it is the main or only reason to know of and revere Michael Mann as a filmmaker -it’s the movie that most often comes up whenever he’s referenced, thus pigeonholing him to some degree in spite of his more versatile work on films like The Last of the Mohicans  or Ali . Heat  is known for being rough and brutal and “realistic”  and therefore cool

I’m not going to lie and say 2020 was a better year for movies than 2019 was. It’s not even that most of the big movies got pushed another year or that festivals couldn’t take place, prohibiting extremely interesting movies from reaching an audience. It’s that movie culture itself had to take a breather, and we weren’t in a good place, physically or mentally, to even take in some of the ones we got. 2019 was also just such a good year for movies when I think back on it. We got Parasite  and Little Women  and Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Knives Out  and Uncut Gems  and so many more that will continue to be pop culture staples for years going forward. But there were nonetheless a lot of really good movies that came out of 2020, and really fascinating ones too. And apart from it just sounding right for a headline, I think I’m counting down twenty films instead of just ten this year because so many more of these will have slipped under the radar than in years past. Some of these were m