Reviews of the Bosch

Every cop movie I’ve ever seen I saw in Bullitt  -one of the handful of ‘catalyst films’ I’ve somehow made it this far without watching. But to watch Bullitt for the first time in your thirties in 2024 is to see the Rosetta Stone for almost all of the cop movie clichés that have come to be worn-out staples of the genre; and that’s something that must be considered in assessing  Bullitt , which can feel fairly banal and predictable at times. In 1968 it was fresh, and in a very revolutionary way beyond even just the cop movie stuff. For one thing, it’s kind of the solidification of Steve McQueen’s star identity. He’d been at the forefront of popular ensemble movies like The Magnificent Seven  and  The Great Escape  -epitomizing the cool upstart in both. And he’d had starring roles in  The Sand Pebbles and Nevada Smith  -but those still kind of had the smell of old Hollywood on them, which was sharply going out of style by the late 1960s -when actors of M...

When I think of the faces of New Hollywood, that lone era when radical new stories and challenging artistry dominated the American movie scene, my mind immediately goes to Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Jane Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Faye Dunaway, Julie Christie... and, sometimes more than any of the rest, Donald Sutherland. Donald Sutherland, who was quite different from most of these others. Where they instinctively commanded power on-screen, he could shrink into the background of even the movies he headlined. Where they eschewed confidence and charisma, he could be awkward and soft-spoken. And where several of them had magazine cover looks, he with his thin face, pronounced features, and penetrating blue eyes did not fit either the image of glamourous Hollywood or conventional male sex appeal (and yet he featured in arguably the most iconic sex scene of the 1970s). And yet he was as big a star as any of them -his name could open a movie, and across a range of genr...

      A semi-regular favourite past-time of Hollywood is making cheap comedy out of elderly actors doing things that elderly people aren’t typically meant to do. Does anyone remember that  Going in Style  movie from several years back, about three old men pulling off a heist, or hell the 1979 movie it was a remake of. For a time, Betty White was the poster-woman of kindly old ladies being unexpectedly vulgar in pop culture. And of course there’s the whole  Book Club  movie phenomenon -movies about quartets of elder friends who engage with scandalous themes on sex or drugs or other such things they’re not ‘supposed’ to have interest in. And a movie like  Thelma , which sells itself as an action-comedy, looks exactly like this kind of dull, borderline exploitative Hollywood trend. Except for one thing: it stars June Squibb. Unlike the actors put front and centre of  Going in Style  or  80 for Brady , June Squibb does not have a level ...

The Bikeriders  is a movie about the fate of a character we hardly know anything about. Benny Bauer (Austin Butler) is an enigma -guarded and unfeeling, soulful and solitary …but untamably wild. And that’s the fact. The two most important people in his life try to tame him, unconvinced of its futility as they endeavour to pull him in opposing directions. One, he has an ingrained predilection towards, birthed of his environment and social grooming -but even it has its limits. He doesn’t ‘belong’ to either. Jeff Nichols is fascinated by male social culture, and chose a compelling avenue to explore it with in this period film about a biker club based out of Chicago in the late 1960s through the early 70s. Taking cues in both storytelling and style from classic Scorsese movies, The Bikeriders  is inspired by a book by photographer Danny Lyon, which showcased the community, lifestyle, and criminal undergrounds of biker gangs across the American Midwest during the supposed Golden Ag...

Not long into Backspot  when three cheerleaders go out partying to celebrate their graduation to a new highly prestige team, another girl who meets them comments bluntly on what she perceives to be the very superficial notions of competitive cheerleading, outright identifying it as ‘not a real sport’.  This assessment particularly angers one of the cheerleaders Riley (Devery Jacobs), who responds with a fairly passionate and well-articulated argument that cheerleading is about the action more than the looks. And yet it’s clear she doesn’t fully believe in her own words, and thus spends the rest of the movie desperately trying to live up to them, pushed to it by a coach as obsessive as she is. Backspot is the feature debut of D.W. Waterson, adapted from their 2017 short film of the same name. And it is set in this very niche world of competitive cheerleading where it tells a generally familiar story of intense athletic determination and the personal ramifications of it. It also...

Over the years, it’s been common of his enemies to refer to the Doctor as a “bringer of death” or some like term -a way to emphasize the Doctor’s longevity and the fact that against his best efforts he has been a cause of suffering through the universe. And it’s the kind of thing that does hurt him. He is a haunted figure by the destruction left in his wake. And nobody was ever better at exploiting this than Russell T. Davies. The wounds of the Time War, worn constantly by the Ninth and Tenth Doctors, was the greatest purveyor of that. You felt their pain, and it only highlighted their enigma. Enigma isn’t really something that Davies seems much concerned about on this run through, though that pathos is still top of mind. And the death that has come from the Doctor’s impact is brought to the fore in “Empire of Death” in a way quite literal and more forceful than ever before. It plays on that, but also makes a point of redefining the Doctor as a champion of life, as part of Davies’ rene...