Reviews of the Bosch

The Informer  is a movie all about the IRA that never once mentions the IRA. Made in 1935, the second adaptation of a novel by Liam O’Flaherty, it is a movie that probably should not have been attempted in the circumstances it was. Even with thirteen years passing since publication, it was a story deeply topical and deeply political -concerning the strife in Ireland that most Americans were wilfully ignorant of. In fact most of them still are -though highly relevant as a touchstone, especially given current affairs of much greater public interest, the “Troubles” means nothing to the average person on this side of the Atlantic. And a movie like The Informer  only serves to make that subject matter more vague. However, it was regarded very highly at the time of its release. It was widely praised, decently influential, and even for a few decades appeared on several lists of Best Movies Ever Made. Like a previous entry in this series though,   Cavalcade  from a few years...

Among his many great and useful quotes, one of Roger Ebert’s best observations was this: “no good movie is ever too long and no bad movie is ever short enough.” And it’s true. It doesn’t matter if a movie is eighty minutes or four hours, if it’s good you’ll either be satisfied or want more of it, if it’s bad you want it over as soon as possible. Lately there’s been a lot of talk about movie lengths (it was even the subject of the most attention Killers of the Flower Moon  got Oscar night ); but not about short bad movies, about long good ones. There has been a semi-revival lately of long movies -long as in two and a half to three and a half hours, and with it has come significant criticism from some viewers. But it’s not criticism directed at the movies themselves for their own contents, which would be perfectly reasonable. In spite of my broad statement just now on “good long movies”, there are obviously solid, reasoned, good-faith criticisms of any number of these, from Killers o...

Two times while watching Immaculate  I was sure it was going to cut away from an act of disturbing violence and it didn’t. This proved effective on the suspense of the movie’s final beat, proposed as something of an alternative ending to Rosemary’s Baby  -to be taken as both brutally just and unspeakably horrifying (in my screening there were those who evidently only had the latter response). This tension between the explicit and implicit is one of the few tacts of this movie that was genuinely smart and successful. Hearing that  Immaculate  was quite boldly sacrilegious, I was largely disappointed by how plain it is. Granted, there are a few flourishes from director Michael Mohan, some considered visual choices, especially at the end and in dream sequences. But if the premise hasn’t been exactly done before, it still feels fairly derivative: a sequestered convent in Italy where a young nun is preyed upon by the cultish sisterhood. That young nun is Sister Cecil...

“I never want to see another  Ghostbusters  movie” was the final note of my review of Ghostbusters: Afterlife , by a not inconsiderable margin the worst movie of the Ghostbusters franchise. The success of that movie though wouldn’t let me get away with that. The series putters on and as a critic I feel a responsibility to continue to assess it and what it says/means for contemporary popular culture. So here I am again, commenting on a new entry in a forty year old series birthed out of a goofy comedy premise. Ghostbusters  has evolved in drastic ways over the years, from a silly, heavily Reaganite take on supernatural pest control to a reverent legacy property with drawn-out lore that takes itself very seriously more often than not. Directed by Gil Kenan,  Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire  is probably the furthest into this new identity the series has yet leaned, largely unconcerned with being consistently funny while diving deep into establishing and emphasizing a c...

At critical moments through Loves Lies Bleeding , an otherwise gritty and grimy film, there will be a surreal instance of apparent bodily mutation to Katy O'Brian's Jackie, an intensely obsessed bodybuilder. They are snippets that have the look of something out of a horror film at first, but are connected intrinsically to moments of emotional extremity, whether it is ecstasy in sex or exuberance in anticipation ...or all-consuming rage at an injustice. They are also very importantly connected to steroids, which Jackie becomes hooked on in an effort to achieve her ideal body image. The movie's opening features a collage of rhythmic close-ups of exercising male bodies, before honing in on Kristen Stewart's Lou -scrawny but tomboyish- cleaning out the grungy toilet at the back of the gym she manages. There is a relationship between those flashes of an idealized male form and the divergently aestheticized bodies of the two women at the heart of this movie. It's a kind o...

The American Society of Magical Negroes  works great as the premise for a Key & Peele  sketch -less so for a feature-length movie. The funniest bits about the concept that forms the backbone of this debut film from writer-director Kobi Libii can be condensed to less than fifteen minutes of run-time. Everything else that is either built out of or arbitrarily hung onto this idea doesn’t need it. This is a movie that is half rom-com underscored by themes of white supremacy and individual black autonomy, half fantasy satire on a specific trope of white fiction -and the two feel very much a world apart: the former aspects rooted in very grounded relationships and social commentary, interrupted every so often by this extravagant context of a secret world of black wizards that is so blunt in its political character it feels utterly disingenuous. As though the whole conceit were just an excuse to patronizingly mock its cliché of choice. And it leans into that hard. Much as the cha...

Kung Fu Panda  has long been one of the rare gems in DreamWorks’ catalogue. In a sea of mostly lacklustre attempts to match or one-up Disney, this series of animated wuxia-inspired martial arts comedies broke through and found its own way of both catering to the silly sensibilities of its audience while also challenging them through invoking themes of Chinese spiritualism and philosophies, with even some rich character drama along the way. You could say it found a zen-like balance unlike anything else the studio has managed to muster. Kung Fu Panda 3  came out in 2016 and had a certain air of finality about it (though not to the extent of its counterpart third chapter of the How to Train Your Dragon series -the other good DreamWorks product of the last two decades). That doesn’t stop an easy cash-grab however. The resurrection of this brand comes at a time where DreamWorks has gone through several years of creative stagnancy -the  Trolls series is essentially what’s keep...