Reviews of the Bosch

If Purgatory exists, I kind of hope it looks like the Unknown. For as foreboding as it is, there is something cozy and alluring to it as well. It has been ten years since Cartoon Network decided to take a chance on a bizarre new programming concept: an original miniseries airing two episodes a night for five nights to be billed as a special event in the week following Halloween (though the week of Halloween itself would have been far more appropriate). The idea was a kind of odyssey following two brothers through various autumn-drenched settings of folk Americana conceived and produced by Patrick McHale, then a director for the network's biggest hit show Adventure Time . Indeed, it is probably his reputation and reliability of quality that resulted in its commission; he'd been pitching the idea at various times as a series or a Halloween special. After creating a pilot called "Tome of the Unknown", the miniseries was produced under the more evocative title Over the Ga...

Everybody’s heard of but I suspect not a lot of people have seen The Creature from the Black Lagoon . Among the classic Universal movie monsters, the Gill-Man is as recognizable as the Wolf-Man and the Mummy (just a little behind Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster), and yet the 1954 movie that birthed him is relatively obscure. Perhaps it’s because the movie is a little less classy, it doesn’t have the literary origin of some of those other films -and in multiple respects is closer to a B-movie, even by the standards of the Universal monster fare. But the Gill-Man took off, fulfilling an aquatic niche in that roster while also being a damn good design. He proved very influential -probably most specifically on Guillermo del Toro, who twice used him as a model for creatures in his own films, Abe Sapien in  the Hellboy movies  and of course the nameless Creature of The Shape of Water . Having played both, Doug Jones owes this movie a debt of gratitude. Spawning such a classic cr...

There’s a gorgeous tenderness through the best scenes of We Live in Time . A warm and impassioned ambience matched by sweet performances articulating strong and very difficult emotions in resonating ways -everything that makes movie romance so attractive, and this in both broad and subtle aspects. In microcosm, the signs of a movie that ought to pluck at your heartstrings in all the right ways, not least factoring in as well its extremely sympathetic subject matter. And yet, the movie beyond such touchstones is mild and underwhelming -not so effective on the whole as its singular spaces of real power. This latest film from Brooklyn director John Crowley promises a lot of the sentiments and structural devices I gravitate to most in a romance film. A relationship spanning a great length of time, touching on the emotional highs and lows from first meeting to maturity. A pair of attractive, talented, and charismatic lead actors capable of working off each other in natural ways. And an ele...

The mumblecore era mostly passed me by. The movement within American indie cinema that birthed folks like Joe Swanberg, the Duplass Brothers, and of course its most prominent graduate, Greta Gerwig, is curious to me but I haven’t gone into it much personally. These super low-key movies with extremely naturalistic dialogue about millennial relationships had an important role in shaping a particular indie cinema identity that has gotten far more resourceful and professional. But its spirit lives on, especially in a movie like Matt and Mara , which comes from the equally low-fi Canadian indie market, though it skews a little older and wiser. It is the fourth film from Kazik Radwanski, and depicts the relationship between two thirty-somethings -formerly best friends with some possible sexual tension between them- who reunite and perhaps mistakenly rekindle aspects of their previous friendship. Mara is played by Deragh Campbell, a prominent star of the Canadian indie scene, while Matt is pl...

Rumours  is a very bizarre film and yet it may also be one of the most normal, commercial films Guy Maddin has ever made. The eclectic Canadian filmmaker proudly hailing from my home town of Winnipeg has often lived in the surreal and the avant-garde -especially on recent films like The Forbidden Room  and The Green Fog . But Rumours , which he co-directed with Evan and Galen Johnson, the same collaborators who teamed up with him on those and other short films, is not some experiment on recreating lost silent films or making up details of his own biography. And yet it is still a very curious film to parse, not least because -though its plot is more conventional- it deals in the terms of international politics, lambasting the current world order and organization. It is a very Buñuel kind of a movie -which is to say its style of absurdity is not unlike The Exterminating Angel  or more particularly The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie  -also about a collection of very ...

As someone who’s not been particularly attentive to pop music, this was a hell of a way to find out Pharrell Williams had a hand in a lot of my least favourite songs of the past couple decades. I first became aware of Williams as the guy in the hat -that strange tall hat he wore for a while, seemingly around the promotion of his song “Happy”. It was his recognizable gimmick at the time, and in fairness it worked at making him stand out. He apparently likes to go ever so slightly against the grain. And maybe it’s a similar tendency for gimmicks that drove him and Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville to render what would otherwise be a generic presentation of his life story in Lego animation. A curious concept, though like similar gimmicks in his career, perhaps just a garnish over shallowness. Still, Piece by Piece  is better than the hat -and notwithstanding the cynical brand integration of the animation, it is a creative and spontaneous lens to tell this story, or an...

In 1978, serial killer Rodney Alcala, in the midst of his murder spree unbeknownst to anyone, appeared on an episode of The Dating Game  and even won that week’s show. Nothing more substantial came of it -the show’s bachelorette didn’t even go on the date he won; and all it did was make for a chilling detail in his story of brief public attention and get him labelled the Dating Game Killer. Curious though it is, it’s not enough on its own to warrant a whole movie about the incident. And you can tell that Woman of the Hour , the feature directing debut of Anna Kendrick, is reaching to try and justify itself with material it has to extrapolate or outright embellish to create dramatic tension. Kudos to Kendrick though for the boldness of her choice of material -even if it is a bit of an odd fit for her. It’s clearly a stab at versatility both in tone and what the filmmaking requirements of that tone are for an actress who made her name on musicals and comedies. Woman of the Hour ...