Reviews of the Bosch

Oh boy, what a time to watch a movie about American jingoism. On its release in 1942, Yankee Doodle Dandy  was an enormous hit and went on to win several Academy Awards, including Best Actor for its star James Cagney. And while the movie is reasonably good and Cagney’s performance certainly has its merits, the mixture of subject and timing counts for a lot of its classic movie status and its reputation. A movie about an emphatically patriotic American at a time of extremely high pro-American sentiment in the earliest days of the nation’s entry into the Second World War, it’s little wonder it caught on with the public so well. Parts of the movie are outright propaganda that couldn’t have been designed better by Uncle Sam himself -naturally the director here was Hungarian immigrant Michael Curtiz, who just four days before the première of Yankee Doodle Dandy , began production on what would be another immediately relevant cinema classic, Casablanca . But it is interesting to get a se...

A television pilot can be a hard thing to get right. It needs to establish characters and set the tone for the show it aims to launch, it needs to generate interest in those characters, its setting, and where necessary, its plot; and it needs to demonstrate what the show is capable of, indicating what is to be expected of it. A lot of shows, even the really good ones, don’t have particularly good pilot episodes because of how hard it is to strike this balance. But the first episode of ABC’s Lost  is a perfect pilot, as good as one can be honestly for a serialized TV drama. Aired in two parts on September 22 nd  and 29 th , 2004, the pilot episode of Lost  was notably the most expensive TV episode ever made up to that point. And it certainly looked it. Between the elaborate set filmed on location in Hawaii, the massive production design for the various parts of the downed airplane and the special effects needed to authentically depict that crash in addition to explosi...

It’s been more than twenty years since Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked  premièred on Broadway, and the window for making a relevant film adaptation with its much beloved leading stars Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel -who to Broadway fans owned those parts in a singular way few theatre stars manage to do in the modern era- would have been within that first ten years. But it never materialized then, and only does so now because of Hollywood’s obsession with intellectual property and this particular musical’s relationship to one of the most iconic and timeless of all movies. In fact that very connection actually makes Wicked  feel at home in the current Hollywood landscape -in waiting so long it found a time to be relevant again. Or one could look at the original musical, which -based on a book by Gregory Maguire- amounts with no disrespect to a remixed fanfic of  The Wizard of Oz , as prescient. However you take it, after much delay the movie comes courtesy of Crazy Rich Asian...

Really, it was only a matter of time before Ridley Scott came back to Gladiator . It is one of the three most important movies of his career as a director (after Alien  and Blade Runner  obviously), and the only one he hadn’t yet resurrected in some fashion. It was also perhaps the most pivotal movie for him, as its success spurred him on to making historical epics his primary calling card as a filmmaker. He has a great love for that style and that material, and it shows through as much in Gladiator II  as it did in the first movie -even if his attitude to the history itself remains much less reverent. The movie is set sixteen years after the events of the first during the reign of fiendishly corrupt Co-Emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). Hanno (Paul Mescal) is forced to defend his home city in Numidia when it is besieged by a Roman army and during the battle his wife is killed on the orders of the General Acacius (Pedro Pascal), the husband ...