Reviews of the Bosch

Five Easy Pieces  is a movie that I don’t think has retained quite the power it had in 1970. It was one of those big hits of the early Hollywood New Wave, on the heels of films like The Graduate , Bonnie and Clyde , and  Easy Rider . I knew it as the movie that broke Jack Nicholson through in the industry as a star, that has that scene with him playing a piano on the back of a pickup truck, but it certainly hasn’t stuck in the mainstream the way either those previous examples have or Nicholson’s subsequent films like Chinatown  and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest . Watching it, I can definitely see why, its’ drama is a lot more subdued than those, a lot less flashy. Story-wise it isn’t even something that would be out of place in a modern Oscars line-up. For the time as I understand it though, it was this great symbol of American alienation as it depicted a man straddling two very different worlds, and not much at home in either of them. I can appreciate that and on some ...

I know that my ancestors were Dutch. I’m proud that my ancestors were Dutch, and if I don’t observe I at least understand some of the facets of Dutch culture and tradition. I am privileged to do so. But while we white people know our heritage and are quick to point out the nuances of it, of what peoples and practices we are descended from, a high number of black people around the world don’t have that. Because slave traders didn’t keep records of where in Africa their slaves came from and when, their descendants haven’t the luxury of that ancestral cultural understanding. For so many African-Americans, their history begins with slavery, because whatever came before has been long wiped away by the evils of colonialism. What cultures, languages, beliefs, and folklore have been lost? What have the descendants of slaves been anthropologically deprived of? Earlier this month I wrote about Welcome II the TerrorDome  -which in several instances evokes the Igbo Landing: the historical mass...

It’s interesting to think what the 80s or 90s version of Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers  would be. Its’ premise, which centres on two mothers who give birth on the same day only to later find that their babies were accidentally swapped, is a natural comedy idea that might be right at home in the farcical sensibilities of something like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown . Certainly it’s been done before in that format. But Almodóvar has tended more serious as he’s gotten older, and after his beautiful self-reflective Pain and Glory , there was no doubt he would choose to explore more intimately the human drama of whatever circumstance he tackled next. And one such as this is particularly emotionally tense and traumatizing -even as Almodóvar heightens its’ details several degrees. That is not a criticism, in fact the artificial elements that pop up in Parallel Mothers  are among its’ most gripping qualities. They and of course the performance of his frequent muse Pen...

“The Worst Person in the World” is not a phrase that applies remotely to any of the major figures in Joachim Trier’s masterfully earnest comedy-drama of that name, let alone its’ puzzlingly relatable protagonist Julie (Renate Reinsve), whom the title would seem to most obviously indict. The title seems to be taken from a line of one of her love interests over the course of the movie, Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) talking to his then wife, and it’s not a very conspicuous comment. Why balloon it to such prominence? Clearly, it doesn’t reflect any deficiency in Julie’s character, could it be some internal label, some feeling of self-loathing? It wouldn’t surprise me, The Worst Person in the World  is a movie very conscious of the inescapable, sometimes indescribable melancholy of adults of a certain age (Julie turns thirty midway through the film) going through the motions of daily life while double-guessing their choices for the present and future. It sounds very specific, but it’s not -t...

There was a time when Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile , his second adaptation of a classic Agatha Christie novel, was going to come out before his big personal Oscar-bait project Belfast . There was also a time it didn’t happen to star a possibly cannibalistic man credibly accused of multiple sexual assaults, an Apartheid defendant, a staunch anti-vaxxer, and a COVID conspiracy nut, but it’s stuff the movie must deal with now more than two years after it was filmed. Indeed the jokes about this movie being ‘cursed’ for these unfortunate cast issues in addition to all the delays have attained greater traction than the movie itself. To some degree though, controversy sells, and Branagh is perhaps hoping that is true for the second installment in a series he so desperately wants to continue. A lot has happened though in the five years since Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express  –which proved not  to  be as effective a resuscitator of the whodunit genre as  Rian Joh...

For as long as it’s been around, sometimes I feel like we’re only just starting to explore the possibilities of animation. In many ways it’s an art form capable of so much more than live-action cinematic storytelling, and every once in a while a uniquely special movie comes along to remind us of that. Flee  is one of those movies, a film that expands the form into new territories, new ambitions of what kind of stories can be told in animation, what kind of truth the form can bolster. As an animated documentary, Flee  is not quite the first of its’ kind -Ari Folman’s 2008 Israeli film Waltz with Bashir  beat it to the punch. It’s arguably also not a true documentary, given large sections of it are dramatizations of true events rather than an actual record of the events themselves. But this is a movie that can’t be confined to one label, something demonstrated plainly in its’ unprecedented simultaneous Oscar nominations for Best International Film, Best Animated Film, and B...

Licorice Pizza  opens on one of the most original, entertaining meet-cutes I’ve seen in recent years. Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) is a ridiculously confident fifteen year old actor absolutely smitten with Alana Kane (Alana Haim), a twenty-five year old acerbic photographer’s assistant with a lack of direction in life. It’s picture day at his high school, he cuts out of line to talk to her, the camera following them through the auditorium; he tells her he’s in love with her, declares they were meant to be, asks her out -her sardonically rebuffing his every comment yet clearly compelled by him, his unusual frankness and charismatic ego. As bizarre as it is, there is something there, they share an instant rapport and understanding -and perhaps it is why she later shows up at the restaurant for their date. I expected to like Licorice Pizza , the ninth film from Paul Thomas Anderson, from the start.  For one, it’s a return to the time and place, the tone and cultural adjacency ...

I’ve wondered when we’d be ready for a movie set against the backdrop of COVID-19. Obviously that mileage will vary for many, depending on a whole host of personal relationships to this pandemic -but it is something that will have to be talked about in film, it’s far too significant a global event to be avoided entirely and it has changed the world in some ways. When Locked Down  was made and released in the middle of the uncertainty, it wasn’t terribly welcome. It hit too close to home, it seemed to capitalize on a collective trauma we were still undergoing. Just over a year later though the same platform that released Locked Down has a new movie in which COVID plays a significant part and the feel isn’t the same. The world’s in a different place now, there’s more room for hope, and we can be comfortable portraying those heavy days of the pandemic, now that they are most likely over. Curious that it comes from a filmmaker who made arguably the toughest movie to revisit during thos...