Reviews of the Bosch

It’s been a very long time since I wrote about one of the most popular and debated filmmakers of all time. But it really does seem sometimes that there isn’t a lot left to say about Stanley Kubrick. Even in my essay on 2001 several years ago, there were hardly any new observations to it -just myself affirming my own reading of it informed by various perspectives several others have had. But I hadn’t seen his earliest movies, which were surprisingly included in a retrospective series a national cinema chain was putting on this past month. And so I figured the time was finally right to at long last complete the Kubrick filmography. Given the stature of the man and those innovative works that have become definitive to cinema, these lesser-known early movies are a fundamental curiosity -what do they mean to the totality of his career, how do they point to the mythic figure, his voice, and his style? And probably the critical movie of Kubrick’s early career was 1956’s The Killing , a bridg...

“You know something, I hate change. I mean you know, every day you wake up something’s changed. Everything just changing so fast, I like things to stay the way they are, you know. I like things you can count on.” -Woody Boyd, “One for the Road” “The only reason I’m leaving is because I want what all of you have now: a new chapter. Who knows if it’ll even work out… While it’s tempting to play it safe, the more we’re willing to risk the more alive we are. In the end, what we regret most are the chances we never took.” -Frasier Crane, “Goodnight, Seattle” On May 20 th , 1993, the most popular and arguably the defining American sitcom of the 1980s, Cheers , aired its final episode “One for the Road” after eleven years on the air. Bringing back Shelley Long’s Diane Chambers, the series’ co-lead from its first five seasons, it brought to a close the relationship arc between her and Ted Danson’s Sam Malone, capping off new developments for other characters as well. Ultimately it ended with Sa...

Still one of the most potent movies ever made on man’s infringement on nature is Bambi . That may sound quaint to say about an old Disney cartoon, but amidst all its cuteness and whimsy and beautiful cel animation, there’s such a revulsion it has for the destructive impact of humanity on pastoral nature; and of a kind that has rarely been seen even in movies since that aim at similar themes. Bambi , and specifically the critical moment of Bambi , is evoked rather starkly in one of the last scenes of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s conservationist drama Evil Does Not Exist . And though it is wrapped up in a context of some mystique, the allusion is very intentional, the anger just as stark. Hamaguchi’s follow-up to his quiet masterpiece Drive My Car  was initially meant to be a short film without dialogue -though it’s no surprise that the man who made a five-hour movie about the lives of four middle-class women in Kobe would find himself stretching the project out until it became a feature. And...

It was the moment I realized (about two thirds of the way in when the book itself comes up as a minor reference in a plot device) that Abigail  was a loose structural adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None , that I was fully in the court of this movie about people being terrorized by a vampire ballerina girl. It’s just a wonderfully smart and inventive lens through which to tell this story that originally began life as a remake of Dracula’s Daughter . And that source still can be found in some corners of the movie, especially in the end; but in the hands of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the directing team behind Ready or Not and those last two Scream  movies, it morphed into something more interesting, entertaining, and even more clever. The traces of a murder mystery classic are just the most thrilling facets of that. Concerning six hired criminals who kidnap the ballet enthusiast daughter of a mysterious wealthy crime lord and stow her away in a ...

A few years ago, I reviewed Richard Curtis’s About Time  -a movie I found to be severely underrated in how it used a time travel conceit to both explore romantic fantasy and poignantly comment on the passage of time, loss, and living in the moment. Yes, its time travel mechanics didn’t make sense if you thought about them for more than a few minutes, but it didn’t matter because of how endearingly it was used. About Time  has found something of a cousin now in The Greatest Hits , which also aspires to use time travel as a means of facilitating both charming romance and humanist commentary. It mostly succeeds at the former, but in spite of some good intentions fumbles the latter quite miserably. The second feature from director Ned Benson, The Greatest Hits  endeavours to highlight the intimate relationship between music and memory. Its protagonist Harriet (Lucy Boynton), a keen music aficionado, has been in a depressed spiral for a few years since the tragic death of her ...