Reviews of the Bosch

“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

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 secluded

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 boyfriend Max

For coming up on seven months now, we’ve been seeing horrifying brutal images of the atrocities being carried out in Gaza. A world away we’ve seen the bodies, the famine, the missile drops, the devastation. If you have any kind of a heart it has been broken by this. And much of it has come courtesy of journalists and photographers intrepidly communicating those horrors for the world to see. War photography is vital in a world of mass media, and indeed related to this present crisis has had a tangible effect -without it you can be sure Israel wouldn’t be as diplomatically isolated as it currently is. But there’s something quintessentially disturbing about war photography too. About going into lethal crisis zones simply to witness carnage. And we don’t talk enough about how  traumatizing that is. Or what it means for one’s humanity to power through it. This is what is unexpectedly at the centre of Alex Garland’s Civil War  -a film that imagines a second factional war in the United States