Reviews of the Bosch

In looking for queer movies to cover each June I’m surprised I never got to this one until now: Victor/Victoria , the musical about cross-dressing, performance identity, gender, and gay attraction in the 1930s -the last really significant Julie Andrews film until her 2000s revival. Made in 1982, it was an adaptation of a Weimar era German movie called Victor and Victoria  about a poor but talented singer who through a kind of double-drag con becomes a professional female impersonator. It’s a cute if faulty premise (the middle-man of pretending to be a man very quickly doesn’t feel necessary to her success) that definitely has that flare of a classic cross-dressing Shakespearean farce -especially where it plays around with sexual attraction. And in fact that seems to be a primary purpose of at least Victor/Victoria , written and directed of course by Andrews’ husband Blake Edwards. Despite its’ 1930s setting it seems very consciously of an 80s sensibility in its approach to sexual p...

Memoria  is all about the sounds. The sounds of the wind in the trees, or of the busy thoroughfare of the city; of the far-off birds that break the stillness, or those man-made sounds of computer software or musical instruments being played. And of course the sound of a great mechanical din that comes at Jessica Holland (Tilda Swinton) recurringly without warning, and which she strives to find the source of in unaccustomed places. Sound is essential, it is the world, but it is also …interiority? History?  It’s not clear exactly what writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is getting at in this film that ruminates on existential fancies and persona, life and death, nature and the cosmos, and anthropology among other things -but what is certain is that sound fascinates him as an artistic device, possibly to a fault. Although it is curious to take in. The winner of a Palme D’Or for his 2010 film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives ,  Apichatpong Weerasethakul has b...

We all remember the iconic scene from Star Wars  where Luke comes home to discover his family homestead has been torched by Imperial Stormtroopers, the tragedy of his aunt and uncles’ death paired with his understanding of his new destiny. It is perhaps the seminal call-to-action beat in cinema, arguably the defining moment of the most renowned of pop mythologies, operatic and powerful, and it is a scene George Lucas lifted almost verbatim from The Searchers  –a 1956 western about a white Texan on a ruthless quest for vengeance against the Native Americans who killed his family and abducted his niece. John Ford’s The Searchers  is one of those films that you’re most likely to first encounter through a fact like this. Through being adored by that generation of young filmmakers who came up and redefined Hollywood in the 1970s and after, it is one of the most influential and aesthetically quoted movies in American film history. Lucas wasn’t its’ only fan; Spielberg, David Le...

There was a time when the idea of older people craving and enjoying sex, in movies and in general pop culture, was deemed gross -a subject so taboo it could only ever be used for the purposes of ridicule. Sex is the domain of the young is the implication, and that once you reach a certain age it’s just not in the cards anymore. Movies like Good Luck to You, Leo Grande  aspire to dispel that notion, for culture as a whole but more specifically for those of a certain age who have bought into that assumption that they are no longer desirable, that their lusts and sexual curiosities must go unfulfilled. That is how Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) feels at the start of this movie. Over its’ course she’ll discover that that it isn’t the case, and her particular journey out of repression, with both its’ physical and psychological effects, is a rare thing to see in a movie. The film is directed by Sophie Hyde from a script by comedian Katy Brand; and it’s mostly set within a single hotel room...

So this is the one that was worth coming back to theatres for? Pixar’s Lightyear  is of course their first movie to release in cinemas in over two years, and it’s fairly likely the only reason for this is because of it’s tie-in with a known I.P. - Toy Story . Of course the nature of this tie-in has been convoluted and much made fun of -ever since Chris Evans’ bizarre tweet attempting to explain the nature of the title character. The movie does a better job: it’s opening text laying out clearly that this is apparently the in-universe movie that Andy loved so much as a kid that he got the action figure from it. But of course this itself is just the awkward excuse to justify what is essentially a reboot of this marketable character. Same for why Evans is voicing the part instead of Tim Allen -who hasn’t for a while been a bankable star (notice how even his role as co-lead of the Toy Story  series was drastically reduced after the second movie ), and given his outspoken right-wing...

Hustling is a pretty popular topic in movies. There’s the classic The Hustler of course, but also The Hustle , Hustlers , and now Hustle,  none of which seem to much care how plainly derivative their titles are. This latest variation might honestly have the least to do with actual hustling of the bunch, a sports drama about a very straight-laced professional basketball talent scout and his relationship with an amateur player he attempts to get signed to the big leagues. Even accounting for its’ alternative definition of labourious -“the hustle” as in “the grind”- it’s still not terribly fitting. But then Netflix as a movie studio is not much known for putting effort in where it’s not deemed essential, especially so now that they’ve all but given up on quality filmmaking. Why should they care to for Adam Sandler’s latest production? Sandler’s relationship with Netflix is in its’ seventh year now and it’s been a lucrative one for him. His Happy Madison company has produced ten films ...

For all of its’ faults,   Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom  ended in a place of immense curiosity by taking dinosaurs for the first time in this franchise permanently off-island. This opened a whole lot of doors in terms of story, setting, narrative tension, and even themes. What would the world look like with dinosaurs roaming free in it, what would that mean for the environment, politics, society, or just our existence as a whole? The scope was magnificent and the possibilities were endless. Jurassic World: Dominion  squanders just about all of them. Sure it includes some shots here and there of dinosaurs in the world: a velociraptor with free reign through the forests of Nevada, and one big set-piece involving multiple dinosaurs in Malta -but for the most part relegates its’ action to yet another isolated environment and small collection of characters trying to escape it. All the while focusing its’ major plot thread on genetically engineered locusts while the dinos serv...