Reviews of the Bosch

The Netflix drama starring Vanessa Kirby in a performance far out-pacing the quality of the movie itself is becoming a streaming subgenre. She got an Oscar nomination for it in Pieces of a Woman , easily the strongest of them and still a pretty good movie overall; less successful though was Italian Studies  -curiously atmospheric but fairly dull beyond the efforts Kirby put in. And Night Always Comes is firmly in the same territory. Though it too has some good moody filmmaking courtesy of Andor director Benjamin Caron, it is a movie that seems principally developed to give Kirby a juicy performance and not a lot else. In this facet, along with the subject matter it deals in, Night Always Comes  is quite reminiscent of To Leslie , the 2022 film carried on the back of Andrea Riseborough to a surprise Oscar nomination, in which the lead actress “de-glamourizes” themselves to play a troubled woman struggling through poverty. To Leslie  was much more of a full-blooded charact...

In retrospect, the smartest thing about Nobody  was that it tapped into a natural though vacant space of the modern action genre. Really, all that writer Derek Kolstad stumbled upon was the fact that in that action lane, already pretty diminished in the modern Hollywood landscape, there were no movies centred on the average joe. John Wick, Ethan Hunt, Dominic Toretto -these are not ordinary people that the audience has any real chance of relating to. And it’s not like such characters are an anomaly for the action genre historically, it’s of course famously the thing that made Die Hard ’s John McClane so compelling.  And so Nobody simply  taps into that old well by allowing for a working-class suburban dad to be an action hero. But that novelty really can only go so far, as most of the  Die Hard sequels proved and to a degree Nobody 2 does as well. To compensate for this it throws its protagonist Hutch Mansell, once again played by Bob Odenkirk, into an even more dom...

The older I get and especially the more stories I am confronted with, both in art and in life, the more clear it becomes that the notion of ‘overcoming trauma’ is a fiction. Certainly severe traumas, those associated with a singular event, cannot simply be moved on from -it is not how our minds work. They can be repressed, and often have been in the lives of our older generations, but that is not a healthy way to process them. At a point it is just something that has to be lived with, and that may be the hardest truth to realize. I have not seen a movie that has articulated the particular awkwardness of trying to live a normal life with one’s trauma like Sorry, Baby , perhaps this year’s great indie darling and the directorial debut of Eva Victor, also the film’s writer and star. And I do mean awkwardness, a sense of unease that does encompass sorrow, depression, and frustration, but also humour, horniness, other feelings that distract or provide some relief from the pain. At one point...

Typically, a story like Zach Cregger’s Weapons , in this day and age, would be conceived of as a miniseries. And indeed it is a fitting format for a story about the effects of a traumatic event on a community with some supernatural mystery behind it all -good miniseries have been made out of the formula. But I do appreciate that Cregger told it as a movie, with both the strengths and limitations the medium offers. There is little room for fat and yet still plenty for atmosphere, its episodic structure works so much better when the puzzle pieces it presents are more immediately tangible. There is a lost art in the puzzle movie, certainly where the horror genre is concerned, and it is satisfying to see it realized again. Cregger, coming off of his 2022 feature Barbarian , was apparently inspired by Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia  in composing a structure of interlocking narratives following several characters united around a singular theme, each sequence revealing just a little more...

There’s a way of viewing this movie as some demented form of couples’ therapy for Alison Brie and Dave Franco. And it’s probably not entirely without merit. The metaphor of two becoming one in the context of love or marriage is an age-old theme that, while having some social or religious connotation to it, has frequently been evoked with high romance. A profound ideal of compatibility and belonging, faith and companionship. That notion that the right other person will perfectly fit the gap in oneself and they will each be made whole as a result. I get the impression that director Michael Shanks, an Australian YouTuber here making his movie debut, had heard variations of this theme a lot -perhaps he’d been to several weddings- and made the natural leap that someone inclined towards genre filmmaking would, and asked ‘yeah, but what if that were real?’ Together  isn’t an original idea. And I don’t mean necessarily to suggest it is a plagiarized script outright as it has been accu...

Two Bad Guys  movies and only one Nice Guys  movie? Something is wrong with the system. Much as I didn’t care for it, I get why The Bad Guys  was a success with kids and families. It pops with a manic energy that is very visually appealing, and unlike a lot of other hyperactive contemporary animated films, it is all pretty coherent and tangible. You can follow the action and the comedy beats, and on top of that it is colourful and features a cast of diverse and perfectly broadly designed animal characters. And there is a kind of attractive coolness to their personalities and the slick heist-movie attitude of the film itself. That it’s substance is very mundane doesn’t penetrate these, and I’m sure many a parent is grateful for a film like it to occupy their child’s attention for an hour and a half, even if entirely passively. And hey, at least it’s a mildly original film in a sea of franchises and brands. Now it is its own brand within DreamWorks though, and some of those...

To meet this anticipation, MGM, Though it is set against a grounded socio-economic background and real history, Glauber Rocha’s  Black God, White Devil  plays out like a mythic parable -or rather two mythic parables told back to back. Part of this may only resonate to those outside of Brazil -it presents an image of the country not often seen in the west, so used to it either being represented by its dense metropolises, coasts, and Amazonian jungles. But this film is set entirely in the arid hinterland environments of the Bahia region, experiencing a major drought during the 1940s. There is misery and desperation to this place, and lawlessness -it is the wild west (though more in the east of the country), which Rocha acknowledges in the manner of his presentation, but also as a form of commentary on the tenuous state of the nation at that time (and indeed the time that  he  made the film in -it came out mere months after the military coup that would dominate the coun...

It is the verbal and visual wit of early Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movies that sets them apart from other comedies or their vast array of imitators. Unlike the spoof films that came after and hit peak levels of obnoxious by the 2000s, the films of ZAZ -specifically Airplane! , Top Secret! , and the first Naked Gun  (as well as the short-lived show that birthed it, Police Squad )- had a highly intelligent, absurdist streak behind a lot of their dumb jokes that paired excellently with disciplined deadpan humour. That has never really been replicated, perhaps deemed too much a signature of ZAZ alone. If anything is to try however, it ought to be a reboot of The Naked Gun . Of course it is something of a double-edged sword for a lega-sequel to attempt that: hedge too close to repetition and it’s hollow mimicry, stray too far and its abandoning the spirit of the original. Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) articulates this openly early on to a picture of his predecessor, hoping that he can...