Reviews of the Bosch

Robert Altman’s 3 Women  was inspired by a dream and he made sure that it shows. Even in its most grounded or mundane scenes, through camera and sound and music he suggests something enigmatic beneath the surface -a tension waiting to release that feels wholly at odds with the apparent simplicity of scenes merely depicting an evolving friendship between two young women (the third comes into play eventually). There’s a certain tendency to the characters’ dynamic and their individual voices that bears hint of an unreliable nature -it doesn’t have the tangibility of most of his better known films, it’s almost strictly psychological. It’s also very much his ode to Bergman’s Persona , which I figure he must have seen not long before the dream that conjured his movie, and he very much adapts its themes of duality and identity, while shaping them in a distinct archetypal sense -it is after all rather broadly called  3 Women . Most of the movie just focuses on two though: Millie Lammo...

In March of last year, A.O. Scott, the Pulitzer-nominated film critic for T he New York Times  since 2000 retired from movie criticism to return to book reviews where he had started his career. He left on a note of concern for the state of film and the next generation of film critics. "The way that I have practiced it has gotten harder to do," he observed in a podcast interview with Michael Barbaro . "The feeling of disconnection between the critic and the audience feels much stronger, the gulf feels much wider."  Scott certainly hasn't had so easy a time of it. He was targeted by Samuel L. Jackson and an army of Marvel fans for panning The Avengers , the point that made him seriously wary about fan culture in the criticism space, was  labelled a pretentious  intellectual in other places for the non-mainstream movies he did champion, and lest we forget he had the unenviable task of being one of several critics to fill the shoes of Roger Ebert on At the...

It could be argued the very act of making The Crow  in 2024 is in poor taste. Initially The Crow  was a comic book series published by James O’Barr starting in the late 1980s that was successful enough to spawn a movie adaptation in 1994. That movie has become a cult classic, but a not insubstantial reason for that is due to its infamy regarding the tragedy of the on-set death of lead actor Brandon Lee. It is one of the highest profile fatal accidents to happen on a movie set, and The Crow  has long been culturally associated with that, deservedly or not. And so to bring that property back thirty years later at a time where its cultural relevance outside of that fact is minimal, strikes one as rather ghastly. And that’s before touching on the movie’s themes and content. The Crow  is and always has been a deeply goth series -by which I mean it played very intensely to a Gen-X goth subculture, in its aesthetics, its use of violence, and its particular kind of melodrama...

Zoë Kravitz had initially titled her directing debut “Pussy Island”, and while it is an infinitely better name than Blink Twice , it also speaks to one of her fundamental issues with the way she presents her movie. It is in concept a fairly severe thriller with a disturbing sexual component and raw social commentary. Yet the attitude displayed by the movie’s tone and rather brash visual language is often comedic, or at the very least satirical, in a manner that can feel inappropriate to the context. And while the track of the climax sort of suggests why this is, it’s still fairly jarring an aesthetic approach for a movie dealing blatantly and ostensibly seriously with issues of sexual assault and misogyny. It’s the story of a cocktail waitress Frida (Naomi Ackie) who at an elite function runs into Slater King (Channing Tatum), a billionaire recently caught up in a sexual misconduct scandal who stepped down from his CEO position and has attempted to re-brand his image through public...

Leela’s life outside of Planet Express, whatever there may be of it, has never really been developed on Futurama . In fairness, per the workplace sitcom template, nobody’s has -the social circle of any one main character has always been implied to be the other main characters. But it is something new to bring up on the show, and it feels right that it is through Leela -who has always fit in a bit less and been a particular kind of outsider to the gang, especially before her heritage as a mutant was revealed. Giving Leela a friend or a social group outside of Fry, Bender, and the rest doesn’t make for a bad broad premise. Making her friend a Chatbot has even more potential for both character development and fun Futurama weirdness. And it’s not that “One is Silicon and the Other Gold” completely misses that potential, but it doesn’t seem to be much interested in structure for this beyond spare jokes and character beats -something especially apparent by the end. I suspect the writing staf...

Nobody can say that Alien: Romulus is an unfaithful Alien  movie. It’s a great many things, most of them not particularly valuable, but one cannot accuse it of disrespecting its source -specifically the original Alien  from 1979. Director Fede Álvarez, like a great many of us, holds that movie in high esteem, and his driving ambition on this film -the eighth in the franchise to follow it- is to honour that movie as much as he can in style, in iconography, and with any luck in tone. And yet, it says something that the only truly successful sequel in this series, 1986’s Aliens , was the one that most brazenly departed in style, iconography, and tone from its predecessor. Generally, the Alien series works better when it tries new things -when it mixes up the old premise of a group of people who just happen upon the aliens, someone gets impregnated, and they all are then gruesomely killed off one by one. And while there are a few distinct set-pieces and concepts, and even a charac...

One of my favourite bits of The Shawshank Redemption  is when Andy (Tim Robbins) pushes and eventually succeeds in revitalizing the library at his prison. It is one of several acts designed to make life behind bars for him and all the other inmates a little less miserable -give them something to engage with and be inspired by, allow their lives to feel a tiny bit more normal, more free. It’s always stuck out to me as a gesture of sympathy and faith with the incarcerated -too often victims of a system that cares more about punishment than rehabilitation. Prisoners need outlets of expression and hope -the signature word of that movie that has done more to champion prison reform than any other. A particularly successful program along these same convictions and noble goals is Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. It is the subject and literal success story of Greg Kwedar’s movie Sing Sing  -which goes a step further than merely p...

Futurama  has long had the prototypical “Bender Episode” down to a formula. It goes like this: Bender winds up in some grand new venture -wrestler, TV actor, folk singer, Pharaoh- becomes ensconced in that world in the second act and in the third act comes to some revelation where he usually tries then to subvert that space or weasel out of it. “Beauty and the Bug” represents the show coming to a self-awareness of that -ultimately it subverts the subversion but in a very predictable way given the track of the episode -which struggles even in its novel context to be spontaneous. It’s not so novel a context, indeed it’s the second episode this season to put Bender in a Latin cultural milieu. Mars has represented everything from the Ivy League to the Monument Valley frontier on Futurama , and here it takes on the identity of classical Spain with the Running of the Buggalo, a traditional festival that who else but the Wongs oversee. Amy, with her love of the Buggalo (and we do get a re...