Reviews of the Bosch

There is a little-appreciated art for depicting food in movies. So often it is mere set dressing or a component of a scene with only thought put in as far as its relevance to plot, character, mood, etc. And there is nothing wrong with this, because as in life, food isn’t always something worth thinking about. But once in a while something does stand out. I still think about the cheeseburger at the end of The Menu , one of the best-looking foods in any movie. That had been a film set within the world of fine dining, to which the burger was a rare sumptuous-looking contrast. The Taste of Things  is also arguably adjacent to that world -but it cares about that food: how it looks, how it tastes, and what it actually means. And in just about each of these respects blows that earlier film out of the water. Even if several of the dishes seen in Tr ầ nh Anh Hùng’s cuisine romance are not the kinds of things I would ordinarily like, I don’t know if I’ve seen so much food in a movie (outside...

Purple Rain  is really unlike any musical movie I’ve ever seen. Its songs are woven into the fabric of the film and yet don’t break its reality -every diegetic performance is an actual performance. It features a cast made up of entirely non-professional actors, mostly it consists of musicians playing versions of themselves -or at least characters with the same names. Its story and themes are almost purposely thin, it’s characters even more so. We talk a lot about the problem of movies being now brands more than individual stories, and Purple Rain  is perhaps an original in that commodification of movies for a purely commercial purpose, as it nakedly exists to simply shore up the pop culture capital of its product. And that product is Prince. This movie is in very vivid terms a Prince vanity project -the pop superstar having had a fixation on conquering Hollywood and by the early 80s had amassed enough power and influence to manifest this dream project. And it is absolutely his...

2024 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Mel Brooks’ classic comedy Blazing Saddles , and earlier this month on the occasion of its release the usual suspects like clockwork all crawled out to ‘praise’ the movie by declaring “you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles  today”, often backing it up by specifying the supposed political correctness or “woke” plague on Hollywood. It’s a statement that has been made numerous times over the years, including a few years ago by Brooks himself; and it has the effect of propping up Blazing Saddles  as some bastion of raw, politically incorrect comedy from some golden age before the movies became progressive. A western satire that was meant to offend and surely epitomizes the values of American traditionalism. And there’s something true there - Blazing Saddles  does epitomize values of American traditionalism in terms of actively subverting them. And it is indeed meant to offend -but not the folks those making this argument think. Blazing Saddl...

At the time of my writing this, the teachers union in my region is on rotating strikes in an effort to persuade the provincial government to, among other things, allocate more funding for resources to deal with students of diverse needs. As someone with several teacher friends, I have heard stories about how difficult it can be to maintain classes with problem students or hectic behavioural patterns -and the teachers frankly deserve everything they are asking for. These are stories that really resemble The Teachers’ Lounge , a German movie about an idealistic teacher having to deal with an outbreak of theft at school and the fallout from a series of unfortunate episodes on one otherwise gifted student in particular. This is no Abbott Elementary  as it depicts, in often very intense terms, an authentic collection of attitudes from both students and teachers reacting to a scandal within the school. And it does begin with a pretty inappropriate act by the teachers, who sequester the b...

Even in the intensely over-saturated comic book movie environment that we find the industry in at the start of 2024, I think it is fair to say there has not been as obscure a character plucked for a movie adaptation as Madame Web. She is ostensibly a side character in the greater Spider-Man  canon, known mostly as a precognitive mentor for other heroes. Sony, which has for years now been scraping the bottom of the barrel of characters specific to the Spider-Man  universe they have the rights to, has reached a new threshold with their Madame Web  movie -vainly attempting to draw in casual audiences with a character native to deep comic lore. They try to cover for this via allusions to Spider-Man, both in costume aesthetics and more familiar figures on the sidelines, but it reeks entirely of desperation and a dearth of creativity. Such is the trend of the modern superhero movie as Madame Web  does a fine job epitomizing its decline, from the Sony camp the way The Marve...

Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki signalled several years ago that The Other Side of Hope , for which he won the Berlin Film Festival’s Best Director honour, would be his final movie. It’s quite a statement for a successful acclaimed director to announce their retirement, and often it doesn’t seem to last. I think we’re coming up on Quentin Tarantino’s third last movie ever, we just got Hayao Miyazaki’s fourth or fifth, and sure enough Kaurismäki is back as well -but not with anything as grand or ambitious as those. As befitting the working-class focus of his career, his reappearance is with a humble, briskly-paced little love story about two poor but spirited souls in Helsinki. Fallen Leaves  is one of the most immediately likeable movies I’ve seen in quite some time. In its sweet romantic simplicity against a backdrop of casual European city life, it reminds me a touch of Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning  from last year, only with very different and dour circumstances for i...

One of the underlying functions of any biopic ostensibly, is that it be an educational tool as well as a work of entertainment. It’s not the primary purpose obviously, and fiction movies have no obligation to be documentaries; but it’s understood that even with liberties taken, a biographical picture would be where you could at least learn some new facts about the subject. I don’t know much about the life and career of Bob Marley, and Bob Marley: One Love  barely changes that. It’s a movie that is happy to broadly allude to the political turmoil in Jamaica that resulted in an assassination attempt on Marley in 1976, a subsequent European tour that ended with his cancer diagnosis and return to his homeland, but it explores as little as possible the specific contexts pertaining to these; and as for Marley himself, while it engages in abstract glimpses of his childhood and introduction to and subsequent embrace of Rastafari spirituality, very little sense is actually communicated of h...