Reviews of the Bosch

It’s been said before by critics and film enthusiasts but Sidney Lumet is one of the greatest underrated directors in American movie history. Very much of the same class as Billy Wilder a generation before, Lumet was no expert craftsman or auteur, but he had extremely good sensibilities and an understanding of how to make a film. His greatest classics include 12 Angry Men , Network , The Verdict , Long Day’s Journey Into Night , and Murder on the Orient Express . And also this film, Dog Day Afternoon , one of his most successful and one of the greatest testaments to his talents. It was a groundbreaking movie too, for a few reasons, not least of which its depiction of the LGBTQ community. Granted it’s not a depiction that has held up entirely well, but it is noteworthy anyway for its early sympathetic image of a bisexual character and of a transgender character, if it shies away a touch from the realities of their stigmatized existence in that time. Of course the movie isn’t really abou...

Though she may have had her big break with a movie franchise, The Hunger Games , Jennifer Lawrence was never constrained by it the way several of her blockbuster star contemporaries were in terms of both critical recognition and commercial appeal. For a period there she was one of the last real movie stars who could headline adult dramas like Silver Linings Playbook and Red Sparrow  to box office success in addition to more conventional big-budget movies. But a weird backlash emerged around her, her movies of both varieties got significantly less good, and she’s been mostly quiet since the pandemic, appearing only as part of the ensemble of Don’t Look Up  and in last year’s forgettable Oscar-bait Causeway . No Hard Feelings doesn’t just reintroduce Lawrence in a mainstream theatrical context, it taps into one of her talents that hasn’t often been utilized well by the David O. Russells and Darren Aronofskys she’s worked with previously: her comedy instincts. It was her grounded...

“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” The best scene of Wes Anderson’s  Asteroid City  comes late in the film when an actor, played by Jason Schwartzman, walks off stage of a play he is appearing in to question the director, played by Adrien Brody, about his frustration of not understanding his character -whom it is notable he co-developed. The director simply tells him it doesn’t matter -"just keep telling the story". Seeking further guidance, he unexpectedly finds it from a former co-star, played by Margot Robbie, cast in the play as his character’s wife only to have her one scene cut. What that is I won’t spoil, but it sets things in perspective and allows him to finish the play, content in what he gleans of it. That play is called Asteroid City , and it’s enacting comprises the bulk of this movie, interspersed occasionally with snippets of a television program chronicling its making from the conceptual stage by acclaimed playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) thro...

We live in a time where there are a lot of people who may not know that a Hollywood Writers Strike is happening. That would not have been the case in decades past. In the age when broadcast television was ubiquitous it would have been impossible not to notice when the nightly variety and talk shows went off the air and weekly favourites went into reruns all of a sudden. The gravity of the entire American entertainment industry grinding to a halt was very tangible and immediate to general audiences, faced with the prospect that their favourite shows could be delayed or outright canceled. They paid attention in 1960, in 1981, in 1988, even in 2007-08. Today it is a very different story. We are nearly two months into a Writers Guild of America strike, and for most of the public the ramifications are still yet to be felt. This is in part due to its timing at the start of the summer, when most broadcast shows go into hiatus anyway, but it also is down to less and less people watching broadc...

Whatever you might think about it, that The Flash  actually made it to the screen is a miracle. This is a movie that has been in some stage of development for almost a decade, going through numerous rewrites and re-orientations as the DC universe landscape around it shifted. As some have pointed out a whole  Flash  TV series debuted on the CW, ran for nine seasons and ended in the time that this movie has been somewhere along the pipeline.  After cycling through several directors and creative visions, delaying pre-production and the scope of the project, Warner Bros. landed on   It ’s Andy Muschietti. And while the production process apparently went smoothly, the movie then had to be delayed more times due to a P.R. crisis last year surrounding the erratic, disturbing, and illegal behaviour of star Ezra Miller. Many have argued the movie shouldn’t have been released at all on account of this (especially compared to what happened to that Batgirl movie ). But the ...

It’s long been a joke that Pixar will make movies anthropomorphizing anything just to show they can. Starting out the gate with Toy Story  it makes some sense that kind of a creative instinct would just inhabit their DNA; they made the bug movie , the monster movie , the fish movie , but it was the car movie where I first remember it starting to get a bit ridiculous. For a little while the company avoided the gimmick in favour of more inspired original ideas like Ratatouille , WALL-E , and Up , but then Pete Docter (now Pixar CCO) came back to it with the extremely out-there idea of anthropomorphizing human emotions . It wound up working though, even being one of Pixar’s best movies, and it set the stage eight years later for this comparably abstract movie concept about living elements of nature. And boy did we make fun of it! In fairness, the generic trailer with extreme emphasis on the gimmick didn’t do it any favours, but even beside that, Elemental  seemed to be the lazie...

It’s hard to tell at any point during The Starling Girl  what the journey is going to be for Jem Starling, played exceptionally by Eliza Scanlen. Is she going to leave the church or abandon her faith wholesale? Will these passions she’s chasing bear fruit or leave her high and dry? Whatever it is, it’s clear she has to escape the cultish evangelist community she has grown up in, and yet that is a hard thing to do given the firmness of its indoctrinated effects. There’s a scene of confrontation where you hope for a blowout or a sharp argument over logical fallacies and very clear attempts at gaslighting -but of course that’s not what happens, her defensiveness has been whittled away by doctrine, by the pre-eminent truth as she’s been taught that the people condemning her are always right. What makes The Starling Girl more curious than your average movie critique of extreme Christian fundamentalism is the fact it is told from within that community. There are good ...