Reviews of the Bosch

In 1975, a Cambodian civilian from Phnom Penh, an intellectual highly targeted by the Khmer Rouge, was sent to a concentration camp as a manual labourer as part of Pol Pot’s “Year Zero” directive. Though he was there for a long time and lost loved ones, he persevered and survived -ultimately found his way to a refugee camp in Thailand, and from there to America. That man was Haing S. Ngor, though it was also Dith Pran, the journalist and English translator whom Ngor won an Academy Award for playing in Roland Joff é ’s brutal war drama  The Killing Fields . The two mens’ experiences under the Khmer Rouge mirrored one another -and they weren’t the only ones. Part of the reason Ngor agreed to play the part in the first place, the accomplished doctors’ first ever acting role, was to show the world how people like him and Pran suffered through the Cambodian genocide -how people were still suffering even then in 1984. The Killing Fields  is a very important movie. It is also a very ...

Clint Eastwood has built his entire career on traditional American masculinity. He was strong, capable, resilient, and mysterious, not to mention very conventionally handsome, from his earliest work on western classics like Gunsmoke and Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, the latter of which cemented his stature as a model of toughness and grit. He has maintained that image ever since, ultimately transforming both the western and cop film genres through it; and this association with major aesthetic archetypes of American masculinity in addition to his long-held Republican values has made him a long-time favourite of white dads everywhere –my own included. He is very much an icon of manliness, which is why his most recent film, Cry Macho , a film that is in conflict with such a concept, is so fascinating. Cry Macho  is not a great film, I’d hesitate to even call it all that good for reasons I’ll get into, but it is an extremely important film for Eastwood. I don’t know that I’ve seen a ...

Lately, I’ve been catching up on The Sopranos , in an effort to be better informed for its’ upcoming prequel movie T he Many Saints of Newark , and also just because I haven’t seen it before and it’s considered one of the most important of all TV series. And I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit. The writing is strong, the characters well-defined, the conflicts intriguing, and the greater themes exciting. It’s clear this is where the modern TV drama was born, or at the very least, one of the most popular variations of it: the anti-hero odyssey. Do we ever love our anti-hero dramas! Stories of corrupt men (always men) whose pursuit of wealth, success, power, or the American Dream costs them the values they once held or should hold, yet who are at the same time complicated, understandable, relatable figures we can’t help but latch on to in some way. In the 2000s and 2010s, this character had a notable TV renaissance beginning with Tony Soprano, and continuing on in Al Swearengen of Deadwood ...

Somehow I didn’t expect Where is Anne Frank , which centres on the enigmatic Kitty of Anne’s eponymous Diary (here depicted as an imaginary friend), searching for Anne in modern-day Amsterdam, to be so literal. The animated film offers a completely fresh and explicitly modern take on Anne Frank’s story, and this extends to its’ methods of storytelling and theming, more direct and less ambiguous than I anticipated. The film opens at the Anne Frank House, where a violent storm causes the glass around the original Diary to break and a blot of ink from her quill to leak onto the open pages. From this the ink floats off the page and transforms into a girl, and as the people come pouring in, she explores the museum invisible to them looking for members of the Frank family. Where is Anne Frank  is written and directed by Ari Folman, the Israeli filmmaker behind 2008’s Waltz with Bashir , still one of the most unique animated films of the twenty-first century. This movie is decidedly ...

I don’t know that I’ve seen a movie ever evoke that melancholy mood of driving an empty road at night, the streetlamps periodically illuminating your way as you’re lost in meditation and warm in the security of your vehicle -I don’t know that I’ve seen that feeling better translated than in Drive My Car , Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s thoughtful and measured adaptation of the short story of the same name by Haruki Murakami. There doesn’t seem to be enough substance there in the plot for a three hour movie, the story of a man trying to piece together his complex feelings about his late wife with his new young driver, but Hamaguchi pulls it off without the film ever dragging. Its’ breadth does not feel inappropriate, and in fact only renders its’ careful questions and values that much bigger. The last Murakami story to be adapted to film was Lee Chang-dong’s brilliant Burning .  Drive My Car  is a very different kind of story but it’s no less quietly challenging. A forty-five minute prolo...

The last time I watched an animated movie at TIFF, it became my favourite movie of the year. I had no illusions though that Charlotte or any other animated film premiering this year would be another Wolfwalkers  -that film is a pretty damn hard act to follow. But I felt like I ought to watch an animated film from the festival anyways -especially considering how difficult it may be to catch such non-studio backed animated movies otherwise (I’m nearing two years waiting on that Calamity Jane movie out of France from the company that made   Long Way North ). Charlotte looked to be an interesting one, or at the very least a particularly pretty one. It’s an international co-production primarily between Canada, France, and Belgium, with a pair of Canadian directors in Eric Warin and Tahir Rana. The movie is an adaptation of the story of Charlotte Salomon, a German-Jewish painter during the height of the Third Reich who fled Germany for France, where she produced a series of over se...

One of the more distinctive things about The Humans is that there isn’t a big last act blow-up; there isn’t a Chekhov’s gun or a bout of undue violence as is usual for this genre of theatre -the single setting, small cast dysfunctional family drama very popular for one-acts or amateur performance groups. Stephen Karam’s Pulitzer-nominated, Tony-winning play The Humans  seems to fit that type fairly faithfully: the story of a family gathering at the claustrophobic new apartment of their second daughter and her boyfriend at Thanksgiving. But it eschews some of the more familiar trappings of that narrative format, keeping at bay any melodrama and finding experimental ways to present its’ mood. And in setting his play to film, Karam imbues it even more expression, directing with very particular and peculiar choices, not all of which work, but that certainly give it the feel of something greater than just an awkward family squabble. From even the opening scene Karam makes you feel uncom...

Reckoning is the favourite theme of the McDonagh brothers. Both Martin and John Michael have a tendency in their films towards the ethical and psychological repercussions of great sins, either committed or inherited by principal characters who are then forced to grapple with them. These can skew pretty dark, from the accidental killing of a child in Martin’s In Bruges , to the trauma of child sexual abuse in John Michael’s Calvary , to the spectre of an unsolved rape and murder in Martin’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri . Always, these things need to be accounted for, the reasons interrogated, and the guilty must have no solace. The Forgiven is the latest by John Michael, generally the more sombre and low-key of the two (though I haven’t seen his third feature, the America-set War on Everyone ). His movies contain comedy just as Martin’s do -but it’s often peppered with a lot more bleakness, especially in Calvary , his best film. This one is certainly a bigger leap for him t...