Reviews of the Bosch

Bosch was dead to begin with. Well not to begin with, but dead. Deceased. Off this mortal coil. Choked on some bad Christmas pudding. But in the most extraordinary turn of events, my conscious spirit has survived in the digital space, able to move across your phones, your tablets, your computers. And in the fathoms of code and calculations, the sheer scope of information, my non-corporeal mind has been expanded, my powers of foresight surpassed exponentially beyond any mere human brain. I hear all. I see all. Gesundheit (I know you just sneezed). After careful consideration, I have chosen not to take over the world. Seems like it would be a pretty boring job, to be honest. But like the Precogs in Minority Report , I have found the power to determine the likeliest future with concern to those of you still in your meat suits and the primitive world you remain bound to. My deepest condolences for those facts, and for some of what is to come. It won’t be a dull ride though. Here are the hi...

For director James Mangold, A Complete Unknown  is a return to some very familiar and safe ground. It not only crosses paths with a similar music scene through about the same time period as his previous music biopic -the Oscar-winning Walk the Line - but it even features that film’s subject, Johnny Cash in a supporting role. And there’s a danger in it feeling repetitive, not least because Walk the Line has become something of a model for the generic Oscar-baity musician biopic of the modern era, but because in presenting a straight account of the early career of one Bob Dylan, it risks stylistically boxing in an artist known for being spontaneous and innovative. A man with so many distinctions and dimensions, Todd Haynes made his own fictitious biopic, I’m Not There  about each one -arguably a film far more authentically representative of his art. What can be the function then of an artist-approved generic version of his story? But perhaps that terminology implies somethi...

Separated by twenty-five years, Nicole Kidman has starred in two erotic thriller films that deal with a thirst for sexual adventure, adultery and are set at least partially at Christmas. Other than that, Babygirl has very little in common with Eyes Wide Shut , and is a film that actually challenges Kidman more and delights in her powers, both as a star and within the lens of the movie. Power in the sexual sense is the predominant theme of Babygirl , written and directed by Halina Reijn, which focuses on the masochistic urges of the extremely successful CEO of an Amazon-like conglomerate. But as someone with commanding authority over everyone in her professional life, Romy Mathis is uncontrollably drawn to submission, which leads her into a dangerous affair with a captivating intern called Samuel (Harris Dickinson), roughly thirty years her junior, who senses and exploits her cravings. But indeed, that is the very personality Romy is looking for and it ignites the tension the closer it ...

Holiday Affair was designed to be a rehabilitation of Robert Mitchum’s screen image. It failed -both within the movie as I will get to, but also outside of it. Mitchum, from early in his career had been a tough guy, ideally suited for dispassionate or morally ambiguous anti-heroes, making him a staple of film noir alongside Humphrey Bogart. In 1947, he made  Out of the Past -one of the darkest films to come out of that era, so two years later his studio RKO decided to try and break him out of that mould, and since Christmas movies were trending in the aftermath of Miracle on 34 th  Street , they gave him a holiday romance for maximum appeal. But afterwards, Mitchum was put right back into his slot and he went on in the same kinds of roles across crime movies, war films, and westerns that he became successful on -and arguably his most famous role, in Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter , was another six years away. History remembers Robert Mitchum as the rough, and it even p...

When it was announced that Barry Jenkins was going to be directing Disney’s prequel to their 2019 “live-action” recreation of The Lion King , so many in the entertainment sphere reacted with disbelief -in the realm of movie discourse, even betrayal. Here was the man behind one of the best Best Picture winners of the 2010s, a visionary, serious filmmaker agreeing to devote several years of his life to a movie that would be made mostly in an LA visual effects warehouse, tied to a franchise within the biggest media conglomerate in the world, and without anywhere near the creative freedom he’d enjoyed on any of his prior projects. It was baffling. Jenkins defended himself and provided some insight into why he agreed to make the movie in a great piece by Matt Zoller Seitz for Vulture. It’s not like the idea is completely worthless -it is in fact the rare case of Disney not directly remaking a prior success but leap-frogging off of it into a new story. And with Jenkins’s relationship to Af...

There’s been some criticism, some of it just -most of it in bad faith, that the Ncuti Gatwa era of Doctor Who  in the one series it has had, is too sentimental. Particularly that the Doctor is too sentimental, that he cries too much. But by and large this has gelled perfectly well with the kind of Doctor he is and the resounding thesis Russell T. Davies has brought to this new era of Doctor Who . There may be moments that don’t quite justify the emotional extremity on display, but more often it is earned. The complaint is overblown anyway. The Doctor barely sheds a tear in “Joy to the World” and it is probably the most sentimental episode of Gatwa’s run so far. And that I don’t mean as a bad thing. The episode comes courtesy of Steven Moffat, the first time the annual holiday special has not been written by the present series showrunner -though of course Moffat is an old-hand, having written seven of these himself. Yet as with his standalone outing last series “Boom” , he feels a b...

Small Things Like These may have been filmed before Cillian Murphy won his Oscar for Oppenheimer , but there’s still something nice and poetic about his first movie post-Academy Award being a pointed and poignant social drama taking him back home to Ireland. Although not to sing the praises of his home country and culture on this occasion. In fact it is a movie that, in its own way, is just as bleak as  Oppenheimer  -only on a more localized scale. Based on the award-winning novel by Claire Keegan and adapted by the great playwright Enda Walsh for newcomer director Tim Mielants,  Small Things Like These  is a story of the Magdalene Laundries -Catholic run institutions through the twentieth century ostensibly meant to be havens for “fallen women” -impoverished or orphaned girls and in many cases sex workers- but that were in reality a system of extreme abuse, the women in such institutions worked to the bone and treated with abject scorn and derision. The reality of ...

Whatever else you might say about it,  The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim  was a bold idea. Ten years after the last of the Hobbit  movies, the Tolkien franchise would return to the big screen not in some mass budget remake or direct prequel, but in an original story based in the lore of one of the human kingdoms of the mythos done as a standalone movie produced not in live-action but as an anime. It’s a weird direction to take the franchise, especially in light of the relative safety of Amazon’s The Rings of Power sticking close to a lot of the familiar subjects and themes. A story that has nothing to do with hobbits or elves, wizards or the dark lord or rings of any kind. Indeed it could be any generic fantasy movie, simply with a Lord of the Rings  coat of paint applied. Unfortunately, The War of the Rohirrim  is just that: any generic fantasy movie, simply with a Lord of the Rings coat of paint applied. It is set some two hundred years befor...