Reviews of the Bosch

2024 has come to an end. It came to an end a month ago, but I’m writing this late because I didn’t want to leave out some critical titles. Maybe I’d have relented and put it out earlier as I have in past years before certain anticipated movies got to me if in all honesty it were a slightly better year for movies. The fact of this list shows it wasn’t a bad year by any means, but compared to 2022 and 2023 , I felt fewer films this year struck me as powerfully, and more movies were just mediocre to bad. I could easily have done a “Worst 24 Movies of 2024” list, with probably a few dishonourable mentions -if I cared to do that sort of thing anymore. It’s also been a harder year on movie fans, from streamers sucking up the oxygen at film festivals to claim movies as the latest punch against the theatre industry, to the disrespect shown to icons by studios -most especially Enemy of Art David Zaslav, who buried a new Looney Tunes movie before it could be released and marginalized the la...

Paul Schrader made this movie because he almost died. He was hospitalized three times with COVID-19 and for a time was fairly certain he wasn’t going to make it. Ultimately, he pulled through, but it left him feeling vividly attuned to his own mortality, his life and his legacy. And in Schrader fashion, he honed in on the bleak and meaningless notions of those ideas. For his first film in recovery and hopefully not his last, he turned to a novel by Russell Banks, a friend whose Affliction  he adapted in 1997, and who died of cancer in 2023. Banks's penultimate novel Foregone  was a reckoning for the author, as Schrader's movie version is for himself. He titled it Oh, Canada . That name obviously perks the ears of this Canadian critic, but the film is not so much about Canada or coming to Canada as it is about truth, regret, and de-mythologizing; about the consequences of mistakes and of running from them right up until the end -asking if getting demons off one's chest is ...

At the time I am writing this, we are sixteen months into Israel’s vicious assault on the Palestinian people; Gaza has been leveled, nearly all of its institutions and infrastructure destroyed, an entire population displaced, and we are only now seeing an unsteady ceasefire that is sure to end with even sterner strife. 46,000 are dead, a good chunk of them children, and this number is very  likely a vast underestimate. At the time that Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham premiered their documentary No Other Land at the Berlin Film Festival in February, the war was just five months old but even by then had claimed the lives of some 28,000. A potent time for it. And yet the controversy out of that festival surrounded the film’s alleged anti-Israel bias and visceral critiques of the Israeli government by Abraham,  subsequently labeled an anti-Semite  by several political authorities -this of a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors. The irony of this happening in Germany was not ...

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who believe they are free.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Brutalism is a very stark mode of architecture. Minimalist and rigid in aesthetic, but imposing and haunting -yet fascinatingly versatile. You might not call it beautiful -or this amateur art critic with no credentials wouldn’t- but it is impressionable. And, especially when designed for a specific distinct project it stands out: The National Theatre in London, San Francisco’s Saint Mary’s Cathedral, the Public Safety Building in my old hometown of Winnipeg. In its vacantness it can be compelling, expressive. Perhaps no other modern form of architecture can make a statement like brutalism. That is the ultimate ambition of László Tóth, the visionary mid-century architect played so stirringly by Adrien Brody in Brady Corbet’s electrifying epic The Brutalist , a film of calibre, precision, and scale almost unseen since the New Hollywood era. Characterized by a thrilling ambition and i...