Reviews of the Bosch

“Do not watch these movies as an academic or as a historian. Have a couple of drinks, eat some some snacks, let your mind relax and let the verbal pyrotechnics just singe your skin off. These movies were designed to be frenetic and fast and silly, and the more open-minded and sillier you approach them the more fun you will have.” This is the advice of Patton Oswalt in the introduction to the Criterion Channel’s library of screwball comedies, showcasing those of Columbia right now on the streaming service. It’s a reminder in such a time when anything outside contemporary monoculture is at risk of being labelled “pretentious”, that these movies of the 1930s and 40s were populist entertainments driven by goofy set-ups and witty dialogue more than anything that could be considered in any way inaccessible. And  The Awful Truth , directed and produced by Leo McCarey in 1937, is about as spare and easy-going as one of these movies could be. It’s simply the story of a rich couple, played b...

I don't remember what episode it was but "Bender Bending Rodriguez" started out as a joke. The idea that Bender would have (or at least claim to have) a real human-sounding last name and a Latin one at that was just a silly gag. But the Futurama writers retained that bit canonically, and over the years made a nebulous Mexican heritage   more overtly a part of Bender's backstory -to the point season six's "Lethal Inspection" full-on confirmed that yes, Bender was built in Tijuana. And it is this side of his identity ostensibly being explored again in “The One Amigo”, after a year away, the first episode of Futurama ’s season nine on Hulu . The idea of Bender meeting his Mexican family is a potentially interesting and funny one, much as it may again fly in the face of his established lore (where does his Uncle Vladimir from “The Honking” fit in?). First though we must return to the unfortunate favourite theme of this season -weakly satirizing specific con...

Many years ago, when I first began exploring classic cinema in my efforts to understand movies more and which ultimately led me down the path I'm on today, it was stars more than directors I gravitated towards. And more than just about any other, Audrey Hepburn captured my attention; as she has for so many over the decades. The diminutive but toweringly iconic Dutch-English actress who was one of Hollywood's foremost stars of the 1950s and 60s, in addition to starring mostly in movies directly geared toward my sensibilities at the time (I was quite a romantic) was also my first classic Hollywood crush. These factors, in addition to her small body of work compared to other stars of her generation (she quit the industry for her family in 1967 and only made a handful of appearances afterwards) meant it was relatively easy to absorb her entire filmography, which I did over the span of a few years. From her earliest walk-on appearances in British comedies like Laughter in Paradise ...

A rather depressing new subgenre in Hollywood, the legacy-sequel is rarely done in an interesting way. For a few months now I’ve been seeing that trailer for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice , a movie already deeply dull because it appears entirely built on nostalgia -bringing back just about every character and set-piece, playing a slow moody version of one of the film’s most famous musical sequences, and overall  just looking like it brings nothing new to the table. And it is indicative of the general approach to these projects of the past few years with very few exceptions. But  Twisters , directed by Lee Isaac Chung, does the comparatively bold thing of not having any real tie to the movie it is ostensibly a sequel to. There is no appearance by anybody from 1996’s Twister , no kind of a continuity or lore forced upon it, it’s merely a new movie with the similar basic premise of following storm chasers looking to disrupt tornadoes in the American South-west. As such it feels quite f...

It’s impossible to approach Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs without addressing how starkly it wants to be The Silence of the Lambs . The mimicry is palpable in its basic set-up of a young woman FBI agent with a focused personality tracking down a mysterious serial killer; but also in its aesthetics, its harshness of tone, psychological preoccupations, and pursuit of vivid imagery. Perkins doesn’t hide from the influence clearly -both his protagonist and antagonist at various points even sport the hairstyles of their counterparts in the 1991 classic. And perhaps the evocation is to more strongly distinguish his film for a market in 2024. The closer it resembles something like The Silence of the Lambs , the less it resembles anything now. Of course that poses a tricky needle to thread, which Longlegs  doesn’t always do gracefully. A movie that hearkens back in style and opaque tension to a bolder breed of thriller, but does so through material and themes more dramatically flamboyant -in th...