Reviews of the Bosch

An interesting early observation I made watching Nyad  is that unlike most biopics now that, when using archive footage as a visual aid, would insert in their actor in place of the real person, this movie doesn’t do that. In fact, just about any appearance by the title character external to the events of the film itself is of the real Diana Nyad, long distance swimmer and motivational speaker. It breaks the sense of consistency within this world a little, but it does speak to the typical instincts of the movie’s pair of documentarian directors, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin -here making their narrative feature debut- and their attraction to their real-life subject, drawn with the utmost reverence. Nyad is a fascinating subject to be taken on by artists so compelled by true stories (Vasarhelyi and Chin perhaps best known for their Oscar-winning Free Solo ) because the truth of her story is up for some debate. The real Nyad has a history of making misleading claims as...

So for some time now I’ve been working my way through a great website that is a partial archive of episodes of Siskel & Ebert  -from the start of their program in 1975 through its various incarnations up to Siskel’s tragic passing in 1998, and even through the post-Siskel years and last few post-Ebert years to its exhausted conclusion. It’s great, and I highly recommend it for film and film criticism fans -I just finished the 70s! And there’s one movie that kept coming up -in their initial review, their best of 1978 countdown, even their best of the decade list- that I have rarely heard about since. A movie by Paul Mazursky called An Unmarried Woman . So naturally, I had to find and watch it. An Unmarried Woman  was something of a sensation when it came out: highly acclaimed, hugely successful, nominated for three Academy Awards, and a breakout for its star Jill Clayburgh -whose Best Actress loss to Jane Fonda  for Coming Home was  considered by many to be a ma...

The central tension of I.S.S.  is difficult to take seriously in a post-Soviet world. Even with Russia and the United States once again on the diplomatic outs, it is a kind of cartoon the idea of a war and that old jingoism spilling over onto the international space station in the form of murder and sabotage. It is a fundamentally silly premise, no matter how much one characterizes the destruction on earth in apocalyptic terms or makes paltry shows at political commentary. I’ll give I.S.S.  this, the geopolitical angle is a new one as far as I know for the space thriller genre. It doesn’t make it any more effective than an Apollo 18   or Life though. The dominant sympathetic perspective here is of course the Americans, specifically that of innocent I.S.S. newcomer Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) joining the crew of six as a bioengineer. After a short period of adjustment, the astronauts notice frightening flares down on Earth and then receive orders secretly from each of the...

The thing about 2004’s Mean Girls  is that it is basically a feature-length Saturday Night Live  sketch. A really really good SNL  sketch don’t get me wrong -written by one of the show’s then best writers Tina Fey. In fact if my generation had a Ghostbusters , a beloved, irreverent, endlessly quotable comedy, it would be Mean Girls . But Mean Girls IS a comedy, one that plays upon heightened high school archetypes in funny, creative ways. Its themes around high school cliques and social acceptance were not particularly innovative or interesting even then -it was simply a good teen comedy. And then it became a high budget, moderately self-serious musical, and there the point seemed to have gotten lost. It became an intellectual property, and much like Ghostbusters  of late , a far too sincere one. I haven’t seen the Mean Girls musical on stage obviously, but now we have a movie adaptation to spotlight all of its flaws in its stead. Just like the original movie of...

One of the most important things Jeymes Samuel’s The Book of Clarence needed to do was distinguish itself from Monty Python’s Life of Brian , a film it had almost no chance of not being compared to. Perhaps aware of this, Samuel leans into the imagery at the start, panning from a shot of an apparent Jesus on the cross to his own hero Clarence (LaKeith Stanfield) very much in the vein of how the titular Brian met his fate. But The Book of Clarence does prove itself quite different, even as it makes a few similar points and allusions. The big one though is that unlike Life of Brian it takes itself and even its theology remotely seriously. To the point that where the former film was famously highly controversial within the church, The Book of Clarence could potentially be embraced by it. Though maybe just up to the part where Jesus is depicted as black (played by Nicholas Pinnock). Otherwise very little plays out in the movie that contradicts the Biblical story or upends its major fig...

Yesterday I counted down thirteen of the absolute best movies from last year. Now let’s finish things. Here are the the Top Ten Movies of 2023: 10.   Passages -written by Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, directed by Ira Sachs One of the most daring queer films in recent memory, Ira Sachs’s beguiling drama about how a man’s self-serving desperation for sexual validation destroys his two relationships gave us one of the great anti-heroes in cinema this year. Franz Rogowski’s emotionally manipulative, toxically co-dependent, and sexually addicted Tomas was the perfect character you love to hate, and yet he was also such a deeply human and pitiable figure, whom Rogowski brought to life with magnificent verve and passion. There’s a lot of passion in Passages , the best argument this year in favour of the importance of sex scenes in movies , as each of his sexual encounters, whether with Ben Whishaw’s tender husband Martin or Adele Exarchopoulos’s excitingly sensual Agathe, builds out...

For a few years now it feels like the pervasive attitude towards cinema has been pessimistic -certainly among the people who genuinely care: the professionals, critics,  fans and experts. In U.S. Hollywood filmmaking at least, some of the trends we’re seeing emerge, specifically surrounding the business and labour side of things, has been grim and discouraging. Talks recently were revealed between Warner Bros. and Paramount regarding a potential acquisition of the latter studio by the former. Whole movies are still being shelved or removed forever from digital platforms. Companies like A24 are toying with franchise ambitions. A.I. is now a credible threat to the careers of artists. And in addition to these are the still prevalent issues revolving around creative output, distribution for non-franchise fare, the death of any capital interest in mid-budget movies or movies at all for adults, and a hundred other things that have been plaguing the industry in what can sometimes seem lik...