Reviews of the Bosch

 “Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until           Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill           Shall come against him.”                                                                  -Act IV, scene i, lines 92-94   Justin Kurzel’s 2015 adaptation of Macbeth  is at this point pretty obscure. It came and went very fast, was a box office flop, and though it garnered some positive critical notice it wasn’t nearly enough for the movie to last in much public memory. The fact that the director and lead actors immediately went on to make the Assassins’ Creed  movie you’ve also forgotten about probably doesn’t help matters. But I quite liked it when I saw it six years ago, to the point it made one of my first top te...

It might have been nice if “Survivors of the Flux” actually focused a little on the survivors of the Flux. You know, if it had been a little more of a grounded look at what the ramifications of the Flux actually were across the universe, while Yaz, Dan, and Jericho work at getting back to their own time and Bel and Vinder continue their quest to find one another. Realistically though, I suppose that was never in the cards given how much plot there’s been to Flux , and I would rather not the last episode be hyper-fixated on explaining the complexities and resolving everything. Still, there may have been a way to make it work, and there would be a great sense of overhanging tension about the Doctor being inactive. That’s not what Chibnall decided to do though and the moment the episode began with the Doctor breaking out of the Angel form she was encased in at the end of “Village of the Angels” I was preparing myself for disappointment. I will say that where the Doctor winds up for the d...

I realized recently that a substantial blind spot for me in terms of classic Hollywood has been Bette Davis. She was one of the biggest and most powerful stars of her era, but I’d seen hardly anything from her peak period, knowing her mostly for All About Eve and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? -films in which she’s supposed to be past her prime. So I decided to rectify that this past week by watching three films of hers I’d been curious about for a while: Of Human Bondage -her great breakout role, Now, Voyager -one of her most celebrated romantic roles, and Watch on the Rhine -an antifascist war drama. I liked the first and last quite a bit, but it was that middle one that I enjoyed the most and found especially exciting. And it seems to be the most apt to a conversation about Davis. Davis had a great deal of control over Now, Voyager , seeking out and campaigning for the movie, reading the original book by Olive Higgins Prouty, and then exerting considerable influence over the ...

The word most often used to describe Wes Anderson is ‘twee’. It generally refers to a kind of folksy whimsy or childlike sensibility that a lot of people have identified with his aesthetic -both in his films and personality. He’s a very soft-spoken ,  thin ,  pale ,  white man who dresses almost exclusively in colourful tweed suits -the word is right there in his fashion sense !  It’s a very particular look, charming in an idiosyncratic, anachronistic way. His movies too have a particular look, and one that seems to match his in style and attitude. They might almost seem unassuming, shy like the man is, and yet they exude extreme confidence and precision. They have the air of a modest indifference, subtle spontaneity and a lackadaisical charm, but are in fact rigid in design, calculated to the finest detail. In fact, Wes Anderson’s body of work may be among the most deliberate movies made by Hollywood in the last twenty-five years. It was indeed twenty-five years ago...

“Ghostbusters” by Ray Parker Jr. is one of the best movie songs of all time. It’s one of those tunes that can’t escape your head in a good way once you’ve heard it, it’s so fun and charming and eminently likable. Usually, it doesn’t fail to put me in a good mood. But when it came at the end of Ghostbusters: Afterlife , the most recent attempt to reboot that 80s comedy franchise, I felt nothing. For the first time, it rang hollow to me –just another I.P. hallmark cynically regurgitated and made meaningless. As a movie franchise, Ghostbusters  probably shouldn’t exist. That original 1984 film was a fluke that never should have worked given all the very disparate elements it threw in a blender and paired with a script that was heavily improvised by its’ comedian cast. It ballooned into one of the biggest hits of that decade though, and a cultural phenomenon, largely off of kids, who the film had not been made for but was nonetheless embraced by in a blockbuster era. However,...

"She should have died hereafter; There would have been time for such a word. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow..."                                                                                      -Act V, scene v, lines 17-19 Televised theatre is great! It allows a wider audience to see plays and performances they otherwise would have no access to, and Shakespearean ones can be particularly great. Who wouldn’t want to see some of the most acclaimed actors around take on these classic characters. The best Prospero I’ve ever seen was Christopher Plummer’s version in a Stratford Festival staging of The Tempest  filmed in 2010. And widely regarded as one of the best of these, often shown in schools in fact, is a 1976 productio...