Reviews of the Bosch

At about the third scene set after dark in The Night House , I found I was genuinely dreading whenever nighttime came in this movie. Though I’ve seen similar haunted house stories, something particular about the way director David Bruckner shoots and paces his sequences and Rebecca Hall’s astoundingly tense performance gives these interludes a real urgent horror that not every film of this kind can pull off. I think it has to do with emptiness, the isolation too in conjunction with the slipping mindfulness of Hall’s character Beth, a teacher who has just lost her husband to suicide and is discovering disturbing new secrets about him post mortem as she seems to be haunted by his spirit in the house they’ve built by the lake. The Night House certainly teases its’ audience with the psychological state of its’ protagonist, struggling to process the trauma and grief of the situation in addition to the horrifying revelations she is coming across, all the more terrifying being the ones with s...

There’s something very reassuring about watching a Henry Fonda movie. Once Upon a Time in the West notwithstanding, he was reliably such a safe and comforting figure playing honourable characters with a resonant sincerity you don’t always get from other A-list stars of the time. You can usually be assured also that it’ll be driven by potent themes of justice or morality as important to the real Fonda as they were to his characters. 12 Angry Men  is of course the quintessential Fonda film in this regard, much as it is an ensemble piece, but The Ox-Bow Incident  from fourteen years prior and which touches on much the same theme of sentencing the innocent, is similarly potent. It was apparently the last film Fonda made before going off to fight in the war (he would subsequently make his post-war debut with another classic western, My Darling Clementine ), and it was one he was notably passionate about given its’ serious subject matter and bleak yet powerful messaging. It’s based ...

I wish there were more movies like Reminiscence  but better than Reminiscence . In a better world, it would be a lesser entry in a more popular sub-genre that infuses high-concept science-fiction with the atmosphere and aesthetics of noir -a world where Blade Runner  was a bigger hit perhaps. Instead it stands alone as a symbol of extreme potential and wild artistic ambition unseen in much of modern Hollywood likely to be further suppressed due to a lacklustre overall quality and financial failure (this movie is bombing hard!). It’s a shame, because the film debut of Westworld ’s Lisa Joy is teeming with interesting material that often approaches the threshold of being good, but can never quite cross it. It can only graze the surface. Perhaps that comes from being too ensconced in its’ style and yet at the same time, not enough so. The movie features many of your favourite noir staples: a gruff, opining voiceover narration from a scruffy yet handsome male lead in a trench coat...

The best movie and the best T.V. show of 2020 both came from the strangest place: Apple TV+ -the competitive streaming service that launched back in 2019 by Apple that everyone agreed was a joke. Granted, most streaming services outside of maybe the Big Five: Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max have been viewed as a joke on initial launch. I mean does anybody who doesn’t watch Star Trek  know that CBS All Access exists? Did you know that NBC’s Peacock is still out there? In researching I only just discovered Paramount+ (they’ve got stuff like The Good Wife and Blue Bloods ), and I still remember the brief period when Yahoo! Screen was a thing -a streaming service that produced the sixth season of Community and nothing else of note. But of course the king of mockable streaming services is Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Quibi -which launched and died in less than a year because its’ central concept was so incredibly stupid. Already people are forgetting it ever existed. This was...

The trailer for Free Guy  first started playing front of movies in early 2020 when it was assumed to come out that summer. It of course did not. When I first started returning to cinemas about a year ago that trailer was still playing -because there was nothing else to show. It played in front of just about every movie I’ve been to see in the last eighteen months, and I grew to resent it a tad -it and the trailers for Ghostbusters: Afterlife  and The King’s Man . It wasn’t just the repetition though, it really didn’t look all that good. THIS is what awaited us whenever things returned to normal? It was difficult then finally going into the movie with an open mind. This just seemed to be the latest gimmicky project to capitalize on Ryan Reynolds’ winking schtick. Had I maybe taken stock though that this movie was directed by Shawn Levy, I may have had a different mindset. Levy has directed his share of duds, which is par for the course of a Hollywood comedy director -but in the...

Annette  is a great movie if you go into it prepared. But then no one can really prepare for any Leos Carax movie. His last film, the exquisite Holy Motors  defies expectations at every turn -a cacophony of eccentric vignettes, uniquely beautiful and at times chaotic (seriously if you haven’t, give it a watch -I guarantee it’s unlike any movie you’ve seen before!). His sensibility seems to be of a certain kind of poetically bizarre, compelling and hypnotizing and full of strong ideas. The same might be said of Sparks, the weird cult pop band I only discovered earlier this year through Edgar Wright’s T he Sparks Brothers , but who have been quietly working on this film with Carax for years -a movie that belongs to them just as much if not more than Carax in fact, being based on their original story (they and Carax share screenwriting credit) and filled with their music. Annette  is essentially their rock opera filtered through the lens of  this surreal French auteur. ...

You might remember that in 2018 director James Gunn was fired by Disney due to them acquiescing to an alt-right smear campaign spurned on by Gunn’s vocal criticism of Trump. It was a big mess that Disney took a lot of deserved flack for and there was a massive campaign among fans and colleagues alike to reinstate him so he could finish his Guardians of the Galaxy  trilogy. But during this time, DC stepped in and scooped him up to write and direct a sequel to their commercially successful but critically despised Suicide Squad . Gunn was only too happy to oblige. Eventually, Disney realized their mistake and hired him back, allowing him to finish his Suicide Squad  movie and make the third Guardians  film. It was great, and sent a cathartic message that the right-wing mob could not so easily suppress artists (as long as they were white and male). Then the pandemic happened and this drama seemed to fade from memory. Like everything else, the film was pushed back. But at last...