Reviews of the Bosch

It’s been a hot minute since we’ve had one of these, hasn’t it?  Can’t say I’ve missed them. One of the pleasures to watching 1989’s The Little Mermaid , the movie that kicked off the period known as the Disney Renaissance, is in taking in just how animated a movie it is. Sure it’s animated in the sense that it’s a cartoon, but I mean in the way that everything on screen is imbued with life, expression, and motion. Consider the ways that Ariel’s tail and her hair move underwater with free frenetic elasticity; or the various nuances of expression both large and small in her face, Sebastian’s, Ursula’s especially. Every visual detail of a scene is explicitly motivated, and the script, music, performances are all designed to accentuate that. There’s a reason it single-handedly pulled Disney out of a two decade slump and ushered in the studio’s second golden age. But now in the year of Disney’s 100 th  anniversary, while it is still arguably reaping the rewards of The Little Merma...

The sad story at the heart of A Thousand and One  feels intimately familiar. It sort of takes until the end and a major twist to truly reveal the depth of that, but there’s still a stirring resonance to the hard circumstances of a mother and son getting by in poverty over the course of a decade in New York; let alone the fact that their situation is an illegal one. Early in the movie, Inez de la Paz (Teyana Taylor), freshly released from a  six-year prison sentence finds her young son Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola) on a street corner in Brooklyn. He has been living through the highly toxic state foster system, which Inez herself is also a survivor of, and is bullied by his foster siblings. After an accident, Inez visits him in the hospital and decides to abduct him -determined to find a place and a means to raise him on her own. A.V. Rockwell’s directorial debut won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival -the award that in recent years has been won by movie...

A few years ago for this series, I watched Michael Cimino’s 1978 Oscar-winning war epic The Deer Hunter . It was a very good movie for a sophomore feature, one of the first to reckon with the legacy of Vietnam and do so in a critical way. And at the time Cimino was heralded one of the great new filmmakers to watch. He won an Academy Award , and because of this was given carte blanche on his next passion project -and we’ve heard this story in Hollywood before: the unfortunate narrative of the one-hit-wonder filmmaker like Alex Proyas, Richard Kelly, Neil Blomkamp. Directors whose first movie after a major success not only fails to live up, but seemingly curses the rest of their career. Cimino puts them all to shame with perhaps the greatest and quickest rise and fall of any filmmaker -that both asserted a predominant movement and subsequently brought it to its knees. Heaven’s Gate  is a very significant movie in Hollywood history, though not for the reasons Cimino hoped. One of the ...

As I began writing this, Succession  was not yet over. But I had just seen what may be its best, most harrowing episode. “America Decides” is one of the most stressful pieces of television I’ve ever seen -weirdly, as it revolves around the night of a fictional U.S. presidential election as covered by a fictional mainstream news network. And yet its reality is terrifying, the choices made that bring about its outcome are frightfully authentic, and the entire situation itself, in which a fascist GOP nominee is proclaimed the winner under dubious circumstances entirely because his victory is beneficial to a single powerful company, utterly plausible. It is how things work in our  world , just as it is in  Succession . If you are late to the party as I was, coming to it only last year, Succession  is a “prestige” HBO comedy-drama created by Peep Show ’s Jesse Armstrong about the family in control of a massive media empire, how their business of acquisitions, mergers, con...

Despite working in the industry for about twenty years now, I don’t think Charlie Day knows how Hollywood works. At least that’s the impression I get from Fool’s Paradise , his wildly misguided directing debut that is ostensibly a satire of Hollywood, but operating off of only the broadest of strokes and weakest impressions of the showbiz machine -certainly as it exists in the modern age. And it’s bizarre that Day chooses a contemporary setting given how brazenly dedicated he is to evoking a classic Hollywood sensibility and the classic Hollywood style -down to illustrating certain aspects of the industry in a way that is highly out of touch with its methods currently. A movie composed on general pop-culture saturated ideas of movie-making, celebrity, and the Hollywood system, but completely detached from any realities of that system. Thus, a satire with utterly no substance. I feel like Day went into this with his character and the general vibe of the movie in mind before anything els...

I’m pretty sure my second ever cell phone was a BlackBerry. I was a late adopter of cell phones for my generation -this was about 2009, well after both the launch of the iPhone had signaled the end of the keyboard-style smartphone and BlackBerry itself had been embroiled in a pretty major financial scandal. Being a hip college student, I traded it in for a Nokia in 2012, by which point BlackBerry was pretty firmly dead as a cell phone company, myself oblivious to just how big it had been in the decade prior. The rise and fall of this, Canada’s only notable globally viable tech company, is told in the movie BlackBerry , a sardonic take on how a little Waterloo-based manufacturing startup called Research In Motion briefly revolutionized the international cell phone market before being brought down by what the movie seems to argue was an inevitable mix of terminal managerial dysfunction and a certain ineptitude in market competitiveness. It’s directed by Matt Johnson, from a screenplay he...

Ever since the first Guardians of the Galaxy  movie opened on a child watching his mother die of cancer, it has been the one franchise within the Marvel Cinematic Universe capable of going to tough places emotionally and thematically whilst still being fun and inventive in thrilling, distinct ways. This character in addition to the tangibly eccentric sensibility of director James Gunn has set these movies apart from the larger Marvel universe -to which it has only ever been modestly connected, quite happy to do its own thing while the wider franchise is dealing with its own pervading dramas. That’s an especially felt charm in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 , which has nothing to do with Kang or multiverses -instead continuing on its own story and character threads as though determined by the end of things that this trilogy (and it will be just that as Gunn has left Marvel and several actors involved have stated their desire to move on as well) can stand alone. Through the...