Reviews of the Bosch

Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg: one of the great early pairings of director and star. They were an excellent, dynamic team during the 1930s, many of Dietrich’s best remembered roles and looks alike came from her seven collaborations with Sternberg, who plucked her out of obscurity in Germany and brought her to Hollywood. Just before that though they made one film together on European soil. Sternberg, who had built a career in the States, had been lured back by the prospect of directing Germany’s first sound movie starring one of its’ great early export actors: Emil Jannings -whom Sternberg had directed to the first ever Academy Award win for Best Actor in The Last Command . The subject would be an adaptation of an important novel by socialist writer Heinrich Mann, Professor Unrat , renamed (possibly for greater marketing purposes) The Blue Angel . It is the story of a middle-aged professor’s fall from grace in pursuit of a seductive young cabaret performer. For this part, Ste...

It is almost a Golden Rule that in Hollywood, marriages don’t last. There can be a whole host of reasons connected to this from career commitments to ego to tabloid culture, but whatever they are it seems a fact of life for celebrity stars -and especially in that bygone era of classical Hollywood from the 30s through to the 60s. Clark Gable had five wives, Elizabeth Taylor had seven husbands (one of them twice). And yet Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward remained together for fifty years, from their marriage in 1958 through till Newman’s death in 2008. They’ve been held up as a sterling example, a Hollywood romance that worked -although that isn’t entirely true. Their life together began at acting school before either had made it big, and it was not as smooth as made out to be, evolving over several decades and phases in their respective careers. Ethan Hawke’s stunning documentary The Last Movie Stars , which chronicles their careers and relationship, is an unexpectedly moving work of pas...

In 1954, Alfred Hitchcock made a movie that implicated its’ audience in the act of watching it, that directly cast the viewers as voyeurs, spying, as its’ main character does, on people and their actions non-consensually. It subtly questioned the psychology behind our desire to look at things, to watch; especially that which is discreet or unusual, that which we shouldn’t be attracted by. The film was Rear Window , and so pervasive was this notion about it, that it is the most cited piece in Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” -the one where the “male gaze” theory comes from. The most glaring influence on Nope , the new movie from Jordan Peele, sometimes acclaimed a modern Hitchcock himself, is the work of Steven Spielberg and early M. Night Shyamalan; and yet Rear Window was perhaps most often on my mind while watching it. Because this movie too is about our desire to watch, but not only that -to exploit, to sensationalize what we watch. To capture tho...

By a healthy three hundred million dollar margin, the highest grossing movie of 2022 thus far (and likely to remain so until, who knows, Avatar 2  unseats it) is Top Gun: Maverick . I don’t know that anybody expected this. It was announced back in 2017 and to seemingly not a lot of fanfare: just another nostalgia sequel to a popular 80s movie being made off the back of Tom Cruise’s strikingly resilient star power. And maybe it’s because I hadn’t seen the first movie, but I found nothing particularly remarkable about this, and in the intervening years of pre-production and filming, barely thought about it until a trailer appeared. Even then though it didn’t seem much destined for special success. This isn’t the 80s anymore, non-franchise adult movies don’t become hits (I know of course it’s a sequel, but Top Gun  is hardly a franchise, certainly not one that has had any pull in the last couple decades). I figured it would ultimately succumb to the same fate that befell other mo...

The Russo Brothers may be the most insecure filmmakers working in Hollywood today. Certainly they are the most vocal in their insecurity –and it does make some sense. In spite of their enormous successes they aren’t afforded the same respect and adulation that their counterparts in blockbuster moviemaking thirty and forty years ago had. They are seen as company men, not artists –and they desperately want to be  the latter . It’s why they make a point to state their influences are Truffaut and Bergman and Antonioni, insist on contriving inspirational choices in their work, and get extremely defensive about criticism –which they’ll respond to by decrying auteur cinema (despite clearly wanting to be seen as auteurs), calling cinemagoers elitist  in contrast to streaming  ( while having just a few years ago praised the theatrical distribution model ), and refusing to let go of a three-year-old grudge against Martin Scorsese. They crave validation so nakedly it’s pitiable. And...

About a month ago Netflix dropped a new series that caught my attention -this happens rarely anymore. It was called Man vs. Bee  and the reason it caught my attention was because it starred Rowan Atkinson, who doesn’t appear in new material very often. Outside of a couple Comic Relief reunion specials for Richard Curtis’ Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love, Actually , Atkinson hasn’t appeared in anything in four years. Which has been kind of a bummer for me personally: Rowan Atkinson was a formative comedy figure for me, since I fell in love with Blackadder  as a teenager. He’s a man of immense comic talent that rarely gets put to good use anymore. Part of it is down to Atkinson himself -he is a notoriously private individual who doesn’t seem to mind drought periods of his career. He probably knows his immortality rests entirely with Mr. Bean, and is no longer motivated to go out and attempt to disentangle himself from that archetype. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it ...