Reviews of the Bosch

I’ve seen a lot of good actresses roped into tepid horror movies to give them an air of legitimacy that rarely ever manages to come across. Sydney Sweeney in Immaculate , Halle Berry in Never Let Go , Brandy Norwood in   The Front Room , Ariana DeBose in House of Spoils  -and those are just from 2024. And the refrain often goes something along the lines of ‘the material does not rise to their talents, they are completely wasted by this movie’ -at best you could say the films are write-offs so the actresses can then do something they are more passionate about. This was the circumstance I was ready for with The Woman in the Yard , a Blumhouse production from director Jaume Collet-Serra ( who does not have a good track record recently ) starring Danielle Deadwyler as the latest black woman being terrorized by some frightful supernatural force. A seeming paycheque gig for an actress in high demand elsewhere. Imagine my surprise to find that her character is actually modestly compl...

I find that these days we have to keep adjusting our barometers for what is too outrageous a thing to accept in a movie. Certainly when it comes to a movie like Death of a Unicorn  which in part aims to satirize the ruling class of today. To some degree these figures do seem like caricatures, their selfishness and hypocrisy pretty brazen in ways that feel kind of lazy. And then you hear about war plans carried out in an unsecured social media chat-group by a bunch of high-ranking government officials talking like the y’re  frat boys and making The Death of Stalin  look subtle, and you feel obligated to change your vantage point a little. This doesn’t apply to all of the satire in Death of a Unicorn , the apparent debut film from Alex Scharfman, which is at times genuinely so overt as to be mildly condescending. But the particular actions and statements of its arrogant rich assholes leaps no bounds in believability for our current sad cultural climate. Not to mention it is...