Reviews of the Bosch

I feel like we were just wondering whatever happened to the erotic thriller. I mean, we always are in this sanitized sexless film culture of the 2020s. It was the conversation in the lead-up to Adrian Lyne’s Deep Water , the only example of the genre in recent years, and which turned out not to be particularly good nor erotic. Sanctuary , a film by Zachary Wigon, is much better, if structurally and thematically uninspired in its own way. This is a movie that at least knows how to make itself look good, knows how to draw its tension and give its actors meaty material to work with. For all of these it takes the minimalist approach: but for a couple scenes in an elevator, the movie is entirely set in a hotel suite, albeit a large, chromatically gorgeous one of sharp gold and red. Christopher Abbott plays Hal, a millionaire heir to a large company, about to become CEO due to the death of his father. While it initially appears he is being interviewed for the position by a professional corpo...

I’m not so well-versed in the films of the late great Dame Glenda Jackson as I ought to be, but A Touch of Class , for which she won her second Academy Award, is a really good showcase of just what made her such a singular and captivating star in her time. The key is of course right there in the title: Glenda Jackson was the embodiment of class, but not in an old Hollywood way; rather in the kind of sophistication and intelligence, prestige and talent seen today in someone like Cate Blanchett (with whom she shares an iconic role –Queen Elizabeth I). And director Melvin Frank knew exactly what he wanted when he cast her in his romantic comedy about a sustained, complicated affair that evolves into an emotional, dysfunctional relationship. The script plays remarkably off her distinctly modern eloquence, as it pairs Jackson with George Segal –with whom she has great and tremendously volatile chemistry. She’s Vickie, a divorcee with two children, and he’s Steve, a married American business...

Don’t you hate when folks start putting their XMas decorations up in August? I’ll be honest, I’m a little bit lukewarm on “The Futurama Holiday Spectacular”, the season six anthology holiday episode Futurama  produced back in 2010. It’s not bad, but it’s not all that great either, and not the tone that I like from a holiday special. It didn’t work those times  The Simpsons  tried “Treehouse of Christmas” episodes and in Futurama  it’s barely better. So I’m glad that “I Know What You Did Next XMas” is fully contained, even if it too branches into a few convoluted stories. This episode feels like a bit of a Frankenstein monster -as though the writers wanted for the premise to be on the origin story of Robot Santa but realized their big idea for it couldn’t encompass the whole episode and so included a secondary plot that seems to be reverse-engineered from its title. In addition to these there was maybe a desire to peek in at the various holiday experiences of the main...

One of the oft-cited issues with the superhero movie genre of late is an absence of humanity in the world that the superhero occupies. Very rarely do these movies seem much concerned with the people the superhero is ostensibly there to protect. I brought this up in my review of Across the Spider-Verse  -a movie that remembers the importance of grounding its character in the relatable context of the everyday people who matter to him. It was refreshing to see one of these movies recognize that. Another criticism often heard of this genre is its general avoidance of earnestness for its own sake, in favour of dour grittiness, milquetoast humour, or intense attention to plotting. The original Superman  and Sam Raimi’s  Spider-Man movies are the gold standard for this kind of sincerity, missing most of the time in the genre’s prevalence today. And yet of all things, it is Blue Beetle  that does well on both these points; an unusually earnest superhero movie that centres as...

If his feature directing debut Shortcomings  is anything to go on, Randall Park’s got a pretty interesting voice for the indie dramedy space. Granted, a lot of the unique and cynical tone of the film comes from its writer Adrian Tomine, adapting his own 2007 graphic novel about an Asian-American movie buff with deep relationship issues. Still, Park takes to the material very well, its rough-around-the-edges humour and compelling though often loathsome protagonist included. He understands the assignment, and seems to at least on some level share what appears to be Tomine’s overarching philosophy here. The movie opens on a movie, starring Stephanie Hsu and Ronny Chieng as a wealthy Asian couple  triumphing over their white antagonist by buying his hotel. It’s a fairly derivative, manipulative end to a supposedly empowering film, and Justin H. Min’s Ben Tanaka, a spectator in the audience, says as much to his friends afterwards, even as they don’t see it, lauding it for its impor...

The ending to “Related to Items You’ve Viewed” may quietly be among the most dystopian things ever to happen in Futurama  -a world with quite a bit of dystopia in it already. Cryptic about both the rise of A.I. and unrestrained corporations encroaching more and more on everyday life and society, it’s ultimately pretty bleak, but in that way that Futurama  is happy to live in to comment on the issues and anxieties of our time. The show perhaps couldn’t have predicted an episode dealing with these topics would come out during the “Hot Labour Summer” , in which its specific concerns are addressed outright, but it’s very fitting that it did. And it’s only natural that such an episode would be scripted by former WGA-West President and current negotiations co-chair David A. Goodman -previously writer of just one Futurama  episode, “Where No Fan Has Gone Before”. This harmony of factors is one of the reasons this episode lands so well -and is easily the best so far of the new se...

The Last Voyage of the Demeter  is a movie based on a single chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula . A captain’s log about what happened to the crew of the ship that transported the vampire from Romania to England. It’s a section of the story that has always stuck out, no doubt helped by movies like Nosferatu  that made iconic imagery out of the appearance of a creepy vampire on the deck of a ship. But while it’s told from a singular perspective that nowhere else appears in the novel, it’s not a story in its own right that can be self-contained -certainly not in the form of a traditional Hollywood thriller. By design it has no resolution, it’s merely a bleak and chilling step along Dracula’s journey before he meets his end. This film, with its somewhat unwieldy title, directed by André Øvredal, attempts to get around the limits of this conceit and the text itself, only making all the clearer the faults in adapting this portion of a story into a movie made in a conventional b...

For many a year now I’ve associated the month of August with Shakespeare. Obviously Summer of Shakespeare is a thing, there are many great plays and poems by the Bard that evoke the season and its particular mood ( A Midsummer Night’s Dream , anyone?), and my specific association likely comes from attending a Shakespeare festival each year around this time where I get to see a play live and outdoors; but it also just seems deeply appropriate to re-acquaint with Shakespeare’s work at the turning of the seasons - somehow  it’s more inviting at that time. And as a former English grad who had a love for Drama, I’m never not interested in engaging with Shakespeare. But wait a minute, this is where I write about movies, not centuries-old plays that have been exhaustively analysed by scholars the world over. And yes, that is what I’m getting at: Shakespearean films. For many of us when learning about Shakespeare in school there was no option to see these plays we were reading in class. Th...