Reviews of the Bosch

Compared to the subjects of Pablo Larraín’s other movies about Great Women of the Twentieth Century, of which Maria is the third in a trilogy, Maria Callas is not quite the same level of household name -at least not in the American sphere. But Larraín is clearly as enamoured with the Greek opera titan as he is with the troubled English princess and the widowed American First Lady -whose second husband interestingly appears in this movie given the link of Aristotle Onassis carrying out an affair with Callas in the years before he married Jackie Kennedy (this movie in fact alleges it was Maria, not Jackie, who was the love of his life). Maria certainly casts its title character as on equal footing, in a cultural if not a political or social sense. The otherworldly beauty of her music is a constant theme that Larraín indulges, emphasizing the sheer emotional power of her voice and with that a kind of grandiose sense of her story to match. Given this sensibility, she is played appropriate...

I don’t know what inspired Latvian animator Glints Zilbalodis to combine The Incredible Journey with Myst , but I really appreciate the novelty of it. His movie Flow  is an entrancing experience that carries you along its journey without caring much to rationalize or explain anything beyond the simple instincts at play. We know nothing of its world, which tangentially resembles ours but clearly is not -it is a setting of pure atmosphere and immediate story progression. It is tantalizing though, even as it doesn’t reward your curiosity, in part because it puts you in a space of cognizance with its characters -a group of ordinary animals. Flow  is a movie with no spoken dialogue and no text to suggest a particular language or culture. Its animals are not geographically related -an African secretarybird existing in the same space as a South American capybara. It feels like the movie is openly eschewing easy context for a kind of universality in this story about animals ...

As he’s gotten older, Richard Curtis seems to have more and more embraced Christmas as his primary theme of choice. Where he used to be the acclaimed British sitcom guy and then the king of the rom-com, he now seems to have decided wholesome holiday fare is what the last act of his career will revolve around. Whether this came about through the holiday classic status of Love, Actually  or if Christmas has always been a particularly sentimental subject for him, it’s hard to say. It is however a less interesting, less successful region of his work thus far, though I’m not convinced he much cares. Earnestness is a calling card of Richard Curtis, perhaps to a fault -and it is definitely on display in his new animated film for Netflix, That Christmas , at times cloyingly sentimental and without the balance of sharpness that characterized his earlier movies; yet that is also not without a few certain charms. It is based on three children’s books by Curtis published between 2012 and 2020:...

Hlynur P á lmason’s Godland  feels like a 70s Werner Herzog movie -specifically Aguirre, the Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo . The arrogance of man endeavoring to conquer foreboding nature only for it to destroy him. It’s a great story, and Herzog is perhaps its greatest teller. But P á lmason doesn’t employ the same momentum as Herzog -indeed some of his stillness puts one in mind more of Bergman or Tarkovsky. Though his particular hatred of his own protagonist seems to be entirely his own. Where someone like Herzog was fascinated by Aguirre, P á lmason loathes his hero and delights in the cruelty he inflicts on him in vengeance for his casual colonialism. The movie claims to be inspired by real artifacts found in southeast Iceland -wet plate photographs dating from the late nineteenth century taken by a Danish priest establishing a remote church. But in Coen-fashion, it is a fiction -though a plausible one that motivated Pálmason in his filmmaking. However he came to the premise, it...

There may be no greater commentary on the sad state of the modern film industry than the fact that a new movie by Clint Eastwood, a staple of the big screen for seven decades, was largely deprived of the chance to play in that format because it wasn’t considered worthy of a wide or even limited theatrical release in North America beyond a handful of screens in a couple cities by its distributor Warner Bros. Despite the fact of Eastwood’s name recognition and proven profitability (not to mention the under-served boomer audience demographic),  Juror #2 is the first of his forty-one movies as director not to be given even the opportunity to hit. What makes it sadder is it may very well be the ninety-four year-old film legend’s final movie. And to add insult, it is his best movie in years. By that I should qualify it is a fairly good movie; nothing dramatically excellent, but something of a decent throwback legal thriller -a genre that has all but disappeared in the 2020s. And tha...

Moana 2  was never meant to be. The movie currently playing in theatres was designed to be a Moana: The Animated Series , a miniseries for Disney+ following up on the adventures Moana after saving her island. But then, likely prompted by the spectacular failure of last year’s Wish , as well as just the general diminishing returns in Disney’s animation output of the last several years, CEO Bob Iger earlier this year had it reworked into a movie for a holiday release (at no doubt immense pressure and excessive labour to everyone working on it). The likely rationale is that the established property will attract more audiences than the original movies Disney had been attempting of late, and that this is of course in step with the company’s philosophy going forward. And it does appear to be working, even though on an artistic, creative level Moana 2  doesn’t come close to saving the company. In fact it only signals a further decline. 2016’s Moana  was Disney Animation’s last g...

Denzel Washington’s foremost late career passion has been to bring to the screen the work of August Wilson, arguably the most important African-American playwright of the twentieth century, whose work Washington has been official custodian of for eight years. He started this quest with directing and starring in   Fences , adapted directly from the Broadway revival he headlined in 2010, bringing over much of that production’s cast, including Viola Davis for what became her Oscar-winning performance. He then produced Ma Ra i ney’s Black Bottom  (directed by George C. Wolfe), again with Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman in his last and greatest performance. And now as he nears the end of his career, he has succeeded in making this enterprise a family business. Produced once more by Denzel, The Piano Lesson is directed in his debut by his son Malcolm Washington. His other more established son John David stars as the male lead, again in a reprisal from a performance on...