Reviews of the Bosch

1980 was a pretty heavy year for the Oscars. Apocalypse Now , All That Jazz , Norma Rae , Being There , The Black Stallion , The China Syndrome , even Alien  and The Muppet Movie  among the nominees. But overshadowing all of these ultimately with wins in five of the major categories was a little drama called Kramer vs. Kramer , about a single father’s relationship with his young son and subsequent custody battle with his ex-wife. It’s the kind of low-stakes adult drama that was commonplace studio filmmaking in the 1970s, very character-focused and engaged with modern social themes. So it is both a little strange and very telling that it managed to walk away with Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actress, and Adapted Screenplay on Oscar night. Against the original satire of Being There , the grand madness of Apocalypse Now , the enigmatic beauty and humanism of All That Jazz ? How? Kramer vs. Kramer  was written and directed by Robert Benton, co-screenwriter of Bon...

The John Wick  series has come very far from that one movie about a hitman exacting vengeance for the death of his dog that Lionsgate had so little confidence in they very nearly released it straight to home video. In the hands of stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski and executive producer and star Keanu Reeves it has become one of the defining action franchises of modern Hollywood, each installment getting a little bigger and more audacious -in terms of plot, creativity, and strong filmmaking style alike. Indeed these are by a comfortable margin the most exciting action movies out of Hollywood presently -even against their most high profile competitors in Mission: Impossible  and Fast and the Furious . There’s just no matching their stunning set pieces and wildly spontaneous fight choreography, to say nothing of the fun characters and charming world-building. John Wick Chapter 4  brings all of these things to their ultimate form and it’s right that it would be the la...

There was definitely a period in late high school/early college for me where I considered Peter Weir’s 2003 historical epic Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World one of my favourite movies. It brought history to life for me in a way almost no movie before or since has done, and did so while being exciting and dramatic and a really charming -even through the gritty accuracy- portrayal of life aboard a British naval frigate at the turn of the nineteenth century. As I watched more and more movies, expanding my cinematic palette and tastes it lost that particular space of reverence, but not any of the appeal; and watching it again I’m still immensely thrilled by it, and in ways I couldn’t articulate or appreciate back then. This was a big-budget period movie about sailing the high seas that came out the same year as the first Pirates of the Caribbean and did about the opposite of everything that made that movie popular -and it has probably aged a lot better as a result. ...

Of any superhero movie, Shazam!  should have gotten its sequel out as fast as possible, and the reason for this is fairly logistic. Kids grow fast and when your premise centres on the novelty of a child who can turn into an adult superhero you’ve got a limited span of time before that feature is lost to a young adult simply turning into a slightly older adult. It’s one of the areas where comics have a clear advantage over film, and it’s something I imagine had to be on director David L. Sandberg’s mind as production on his Shazam!  sequel was delayed by more than a year due to the pandemic. And in the finished film it is noticeable how grown-up Billy Batson and the other kids are, Asher Angel in particular looking about old enough to be the superhero in his own right. And I hate to think that this is why he has significantly less screen time than he did in the first movie, his character staying in Zachary Levi Shazam-mode for the vast majority of the film. In fact it’s no...

I wonder if true crime podcasts and documentary television have killed true crime movies. That the abundance of them and their popularity makes movie interpretations less potent, less gripping, not to mention less surprising -as just about every serial killer in U.S. history has been covered extensively by this craze. There have been so few true crime movies in recent years and I can’t believe it’s a coincidence that they generally haven’t been any good. We’re a far cry from the like of Memories of Murder and  Zodiac ,   to say nothing of the many great fictional serial killer movies that draw on real cases; and Hulu’s Boston Strangler  (the latest softball from a neutered 20 th  Century Studios), is one of the most dimly clinical thus far. Written and directed by Matt Ruskin, the film takes the perspective of the Boston Record American (later the Boston Herald ) journalist who first broke the story of the serial killer in the early 1960s, differentiating i...

I think a lot of movie fans and commentators take for granted the success of the Jurassic World  movies. Generally dismissed as quality movies though they may be, the first and third especially were major box office hits, the former being the eighth highest grossing movie of all time and the latter the third highest grossing movie of 2022. Dinosaurs, even thinly rendered CGI ones, are popular with audiences. But outside of the Jurassic franchise nobody has really tried to make a big budget movie with dinosaurs -largely I suspect because the action that would necessitate a human component  requires certain broad leaps of plotting there’s no guarantee an audience would be on board for. To not look like a total conceptual rip-off of the Jurassic  movies, it’s either got to involve time travel or aliens (or just be another adaptation of The Lost World ). 65  goes for the latter, envisioning a technologically advanced humanoid civilization on another planet around the t...

“2022 is the year we came back to the movies” has become something of a rote and over-repeated catchphrase during this year’s awards cycle. I’m hardly blameless of course, I’ve gone to that well myself and there is truth to it if can be ascertained by the box office for movies like Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water . But it also has started to come off a bit shallow, a pithy way of acknowledging a particular greatness in this year’s movies (indeed I think it might have been the best year for movies since 2019) without really celebrating that breadth meaningfully. I was thinking about that through this years’ Oscar telecast, in which only half of the ten Best Picture nominated films won anything at all -with two in particular vastly overshadowing the rest. A formidable result for them, but not exactly representative of the great year in movies it has been. 2023 needed to be the year the Oscars came back though. And they did, whatever you might think of them. The 95 th ...