Reviews of the Bosch

To Leslie  is the kind of perfectly fine film that’s a minor hit at South by Southwest, goes on to win maybe a few Independent Spirit Awards and then vanishes from recognition for all but the most ardent fans of either indie cinema or its particular lead actress. And there isn’t anything wrong with that, those kind of movies are good and useful -often great places for filmmakers and actors to stretch their capabilities in interesting ways. They don’t tend to stick around thought. But of course this one is an exception. Here I am covering it almost a year after it premiered to a modestly positive response at SXSW, for reasons both good and arguably bad for the movie’s publicity. Andrea Riseborough’s out-of-left-field Oscar nomination for To Leslie  is both a blessing and a curse for the scrappy indie movie from Michael Morris -his first feature film, though he’s been a prodigious and successful television director, and even one-time director of the Old Vic in London. Potentiall...

I’m far too young to remember when Eddie Murphy was the biggest star in the world. But even just reading into the history it’s pretty remarkable, the story of this wonder-kid comedian who landed SNL  at nineteen, revitalized the program before skyrocketing in popularity off of his legendary stand-up routines and co-starring roles in movies like 48 Hrs and Trading Places . He even had a not so fondly remembered pop music hit, “Party All the Time” –and all while he was still in his early twenties. And one of the formative points of that biography was in 1984 when Murphy made his solo-starring movie debut with Beverly Hills Cop  –which quickly became the highest-grossing movie of that year and cemented Murphy’s superstar status for the rest of that decade. It’s not hard to glean why, even as the movie, directed by Martin Brest, doesn’t feel particularly smart or innovative as a buddy action movie on its own merits. Murphy’s power of personality is extremely charismatic and the mo...

Don't Look Now (1973) Will Hays, Who Knows About Sex In 1930, former Republican politician and chair of the Motion Picture Association of America Will Hayes introduced a series of self-censorship guidelines for the movie industry in response to a mixture of celebrity scandals and lobbying from the Catholic Church against various ‘immoralities’ creating a perception of Hollywood as corrupt and indecent. The Hays Code, or the Motion Picture Production Code, was formally adopted in 1930, though not stringently enforced until 1934 under the auspices of Joseph Breen. It laid out a careful list of what was and wasn’t acceptable for a film expecting major distribution. It stipulated rules against profanity, the depiction of miscegenation, and offensive portrayals of the clergy, but a lot of it was based around sexual content: “sexual perversion” of any kind was disallowed, as were any opaquely textual or visual allusions to reproduction, and right near the top “No licentious or suggestiv...

Lukas Dhont never explicitly identifies the lead characters of his movie Close  as queer. It might be easy to make that assumption, especially coming on the heels of Girl , his controversial debut film about a trans girl pursuing a career in ballet. But it’s a distinction never made clear. And the movie is actually better for this, as it doesn’t limit the experiences and emotions highlighted through this film to only the purview of one community. Maybe Léo and Rémi are gay, maybe they’re not -it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that they are close, which they are not socially allowed to be as boys growing up in a rigidly gendered, heteronormative culture. Extrinsic and internalized toxic masculinity and homophobia are the root of all evil in Close , a very good though heartbreaking movie about a childhood relationship torn apart by social and psychological stigma. Lukas Dhont was inspired by a clinical book called Deep Secrets , about the unique intimacy between boys...

Marvel has rarely been terribly grounded as a media franchise. For a long time now it has primarily been concerned with its grandiose world or universe-threatening affairs and the stories of heroes and their relationships to other heroes. That’s why the Ant-Man  movies have been kind of refreshing. Compared to the big guns of Iron Man , Captain America  or Thor , they’ve been low, personal-stakes action-comedies centred on the only Avenger who could reasonably pass for an ordinary guy: a San Francisco working class ex-con whose humble life goals and relationships, including with his ex-wife and daughter, are as important as his superhero-ing. Directed by Peyton Reed, both Ant-Man  and Ant-Man and the Wasp , though not necessarily the cream of Marvel’s crop, have been fun and charming movies for this -among the few MCU movies I’ve had the desire to go back and revisit. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania  throws all of that out. And though Reed is once again at the helm...

2022 was shockingly a year of renewed reckoning with the murder of Emmett Till. First in the media space was an ABC miniseries called Women of the Movement  released in January right as both mother and son were posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. In March, the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act was signed into law in the United States, the culmination of over sixty years of campaigning (and which soberly still did not have unanimous support in either congressional house). In June an unserved arrest warrant for Till’s accuser Carolyn Bryant dated August 29 th  1955, the day after the murder, was discovered in a Mississippi courthouse basement. Barely a month later an unpublished memoir by Bryant was leaked publicly, a work of historical revisionism that shows little remorse and no acknowledgement of her own role in the lynching. Renewed calls for her arrest followed this to no avail -a cruel reminder that none of the guilty ever suffered consequences for their hate cr...