Reviews of the Bosch

A shame it took me so long to take a look at the work of Ida Lupino. I mean I’d seen her in a couple movies here and there, but never before focused on her far more meaningful career as a director. And she was a seminal one -virtually the only woman director active during the Golden Age of Hollywood. For her Filmmakers production company, she made several thematically ambitious, often socially conscious movies unlike anything being produced at the time for the bigger studios: films about unwed pregnancy, sexual assault, serial killers, struggles with polio -and her name recognition as an actress gave her and these films credibility. In her later years she worked mostly in television, where she directed among other shows the scariest episode of The Twilight Zone  I’ve seen (“The Masks” -it’ll give you nightmares). And even though she never identified with the term, she has long been upheld as a major figure of feminist film history. The last film of her peak directing era and one of...

Oh, that these unhappy times should be ours. Would that we could escape them to a better time and dwell in its embrace instead. I would venture to guess that these kind of thoughts aren’t only on my mind lately. Everybody is feeling it, we are living through chaotic times in both our immediate spheres and the world at large. From the climate crisis to democratic backsliding, human rights in danger all over the world to unchecked capitalism reaching its dystopian zenith, it seems like everything is bad and is on track to only get worse. And all of it bears down and suffocates, the pressures of the world are inescapable in a way that seems so much more pronounced than for generations past. Certainly it’s harder in a practical sense too –everything costs more, more is expected, the everyday comforts of life are out of reach for younger people. And nobody currently with the power to do so has any desire to fix it. Living in the present is hard, looking to the past is easy. Th...

Bottoms  is derivative of a lot of movies. Obviously, it’s plot is a spin on the several decades worth of teen comedies revolving around high school boys trying to get laid -from  Porky’s  and  Revenge of the Nerds   through  to American Pie and Superbad . It’s  combination of that typical raunchiness through a feminine approach owes a lot to  Booksmart  -it’s most obvious point of comparison in the teen comedy genre of late. And then there’s the very fact that it’s central premise capitalizes on a phenomenon directly descended from and named after  Fight Club . And yet in spite of all this,  Bottoms  is a movie incredibly distinct and spontaneous. A lot of that comes down to its principal creative team: Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennott, who co-wrote the film together with Seligman directing. Their last movie,  Shiva Baby , was one of the most original and thrilling comedies in years; and while  Bottoms  is decid...

The eighth season of Futurama  has not been a stellar return to form after a decade away. It has struggled in both ideas and humour, fumbled some of its characterization and commentary, and its best episodes have merely been okay by the standards of its classic run. Overall, the season has done little to justify its renewed existence. There was a point in “All the Way Down” where, in light of last week’s episode, I worried the entire show was going to be another style gimmick of the minimalist Minecraft -like pixelated format introduced as the reality for a miniature universe the Professor has created. But David X. Cohen, Futurama ’s executive producer, architect, and the credited writer on this episode, let sharper instincts prevail. Surprisingly intellectually captivating ones in fact. I still don’t know that Futurama has earned this revival, but “All the Way Down” demonstrates there are still rich and compelling ideas for the show to mine. When I heard that this episode was goin...

Earlier this year I watched Pablo Larraín’s Ema  -it was the first non-English, non-biographical film from him I’d seen and I liked it quite a bit. It is a wild, freaky, sexy movie about a queer woman’s determination to reconnect with her pyromaniac son -quite a degree removed from the like of Jackie  and Spencer , indicating that while he’s been identified in the western world by methodical biopics, in his native Chile, Larraín is something more of an eccentric. I haven’t seen movies like No  or Neruda  that would back this up, but El Conde  certainly does: a bleak satire film set in the final years in the life of Augusto Pinochet that re-imagines the infamous dictator as a centuries-old vampire. I suppose casting the great monster of your nation’s history as a literal supernatural monster is one way of reckoning with their legacy -surprised Germany or Spain hasn’t tried that yet. It’s a bizarre idea, one devoid of any nuance; Pinochet’s story in the film opens...

Perhaps the greatest strength of A Haunting in Venice i s the obscurity of it’s source. Hallowe’en Party is not one of Agatha Christie’s better known works. Where Murder on the Orient Express , Death on the Nile , And Then There Were None  are household names, this late Poirot mystery (written during that time when Christie was quite publicly fed up with the character and was writing his stories reluctantly) is not particularly notable beyond it’s tie-in to a popular holiday. And yet it proves a good fit for an instalment in a film series that has had its own turbulent relationship with the iconic Belgian sleuth. For as much as Kenneth Branagh clearly loves playing Poirot, he doesn’t seem all that satisfied by the traditional contours of the novels he is working off of. He can’t quite shake those blockbuster instincts or his particular ideas about Poirot’s history and inner demons. And the mixed reception to this take on the character seems to have not passed him by. I wonder if th...