Reviews of the Bosch

For its upbeat tempo and optimistic spirit, “Pennies from Heaven” is subtly a fairly depressing song. Though the lyrics are intrinsically hopeful, the circumstances implied of the singer’s fantasy suggests a real sense of misery. It is in a way the perfect song of the Great Depression, and I’ve seen it multiple times underscoring that era and a diminishing of fortunes more broadly within it. The ultimate desperate fantasy of the financially insecure: that every time it rains there will be pennies from heaven -mere pennies. It is a beautiful song, but achingly bittersweet. And its spirit is captured well in the 1981 movie of the same name -that feels a touch like something from the 1930s, but would have been positively cruel had it actually come in that era. Pennies from Heaven  was written by Dennis Potter, a legend of British television drama, adapting his own highly successful and beloved serial of the same name for the BBC (the breakout project for Bob Hoskins incidentally). For...

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...

Despite his wife and co-writer Tricia Cooke being a lesbian, Ethan Coen’s recent pair of crime films have a somewhat myopic view of lesbianism that proudly centre queer identities yet trade in certain stereotypes along the way -as though portraying lesbians in a positive protagonist light in general gives licence to characterize lesbian culture and aesthetics with less nuance. This is evident in Honey Don’t across several scenes that feel the need to openly emphasize, to both characters in-movie and the audience, that Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) “likes girls” while also portraying her consciously in ways that subvert aspects of cultural femininity. The kind of things that would be expected or even appreciated in the 1980s or 90s, but feel like a gimmick or borderline fetishization today. In 2025 a lesbian character is not all that taboo, but Coen and Cooke seem to think it is. It’s far from the only awkward problem with Honey Don’t , Ethan’s second movie without his brother Joel...

Hollywood has never not dominated the worldwide box office. Decade after decade it has been the titan of commercial cinema around the globe with few genuine competitors. More recent times have shown industries in India and China as having a scale to match though not the same reach. But there are signs the tides may be changing, that Hollywood’s foothold is not quite so durable, and it is astonishing that the most dramatic evidence is coming with the movie Ne Zha 2 . Ne Zha 2 is an epic animated fantasy-comedy film  based on figures from Chinese mythology directed by Jiaozi (only his second feature film after the first Ne Zha  from 2019). Starring a manic little kid, it appears to be a broad action comedy for children equivalent to something from Illumination Studios in the west. And yet, released domestically at the Chinese New Year, this movie has broken several box office records in seemingly one fell swoop. Raking in more than 2.2 billion dollars it...

There are several problems with the movie Eenie Meanie , starting with the fact it is called “ Eenie Meanie ”. Another big one though is that in spite of that puerile title it endeavours to take itself, for the most part, seriously; like a genuine, dramatic crime movie with a pair of heroes who might be a latter day Bonnie and Clyde. More power to debut writer-director Shawn Simmons, who does seem honestly compelled by these characters and their personal stakes, but his tonally counter-intuitive title and character -which seem positively winking in nature- set the movie on a bad disjointed path right from the get. And I think even he knows it, consciously dropping “Eenie Meanie” from the most critical sequences. Not that it particularly helps them. For its silly juvenile sound, the “Eenie Meanie” moniker comes from a rather tragic situation -bestowed on a girl Edie as a young teenager by a gangster as well as her drug addict parents, exploiting her as a getaway driver for criminal jobs...