Reviews of the Bosch

Picture a man, interested in a career in the movies, who finally gets the chance to write and direct a feature film for the first time and after he does so that movie is popularly hailed one of the greatest ever made. This man you are picturing -likely it’s Orson Welles. But it is also Frank Darabont. Frank Darabont, the working-class son of Hungarian immigrants (he himself was born in a refugee camp) who fell in love with the movies upon seeing George Lucas’s THX 1138 , wasn’t the total stranger to the medium that Welles had been when he directed his first film and masterpiece The Shawshank Redemption in 1994, but he was still a guy who came relatively out of nowhere. His credits up to that point consisted of co-writing three horror films: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 , the 1988 remake of  The Blob , and The Fly II as well as several episodes of the TV series Tales from the Crypt  and  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles . He made his official directing debut with a l...

It’s called The Crowd because it is about all of us. King Vidor is a director I’m not as familiar with as I should be given his stature in old Hollywood. He’s one of the earliest American directors singled out by the proponents of auteur theory as a significant visionary filmmaker. Probably it was because he was also a little more grounded and addressed certain audiences and issues left behind by a lot of the more escapist fare. Even one of the few early films of his I have seen, Bird of Paradise , feels like a direct challenge to the censor. But it’s been a while since I’ve looked at a silent film and The Crowd is one of Vidor’s greatest, a deeply humanist working-class odyssey released virtually on the eve of the Great Depression. It has to be one of the earlier movies, certainly on a large scale to truly challenge the lie of the American Dream and do so very vividly, both in its narrative and its intensely symbolic visuals -which were apart from that quite experimental in Hollywood ...

The Alto Knights would have been a better movie if it had been made twenty or more years ago. The story of its fascinating chapter of mafia history and corruption might have still had some juice to it, it’s filmmaking might not have appeared quite so dated, and there may have been more energy made of Nicholas Pileggi’s script coming off of his gangster hits in Goodfellas  and Casino . It also would not have necessitated the extreme make-up and effects needed to make Robert De Niro look twenty years younger. In spite of exceptional efforts, there is a tiredness that comes off of him and off of the story itself for as much as its substance is still very intriguing. I wonder if a part of that doesn’t come from the movie’s director Barry Levinson, who carries a certain degree of industry heavyweight as an Oscar-winner, but who has since Rain Man made far more bad movies than good or memorable ones; and he hasn’t directed one at all since the much reviled Rock the Kasbah ...

Despite being the movie that launched feature film animation as we know it, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs  is curiously underrated these days. Everyone knows it of course, it is far too iconic, but it seems rarely acknowledged both for its significance and its genuine strength as a movie, overshadowed certainly among my generation by the onslaught of the Disney Renaissance. But I think it remains to this day one of Disney’s most beautiful works and until now comparatively one of its least exploited. As Disney has found themselves running out of heavy-hitter titles to the nostalgia-brained of my generation for making pale modern copies of, they’ve finally made their way back to the last untouched princess movie in their classical canon, and also the movie that started it all. But in cannibalizing Snow White , Disney knowing the fact its not quite so beloved to their target demographic means there’s less pressure of fidelity. They don’t have to try so hard to replicate the ori...