Reviews of the Bosch

The secret about the clandestine conspiracy at the heart of Three Days of the Condor  is that it is barely a conspiracy -and that the United States government was not too far away from just being open about it. Certainly today they’d have no qualms about the American people knowing the depths of their foreign interference, the specific economic interests behind it, and their carelessness over what collateral damage it would cause. It was an innocent age when U.S. institutions cared about the appearance of diplomacy, enough so that they would assassinate anyone threatening to expose it as a lie.  Three Days of the Condor  could not be made today because it’s world is long extinct. And also because there isn’t really a Robert Redford among the current crop of Hollywood stars. That is especially apparent to many people now as we reel from the death of one of the great American cinematic legends -not only in front of and behind the screen but as a critical figure in the emerg...

It’s interesting. Despite being one of the most famous works in theatre and a widely regarded pinnacle for any great female actor, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler  hasn’t often been adapted on film. Before Nia DaCosta took a crack at it, there existed only one major cinematic translation of the play, and that was a Glenda Jackson vehicle from fifty years ago notable mostly for netting her a final Best Actress Oscar nomination. And the work is not like a Waiting for Godot , where it would be difficult to translate its effects to film -it is a largely conventional narrative. My only guess is that, like the works of Chekhov or Dostoesvsky, its European heritage has made it unpopular for the American film industry. And this makes it even more of a gamble that DaCosta’s Hedda  isn’t just telling this story on film but in a repurposed context, specifically in gender-swapping one of the central characters to present it from a queer angle. However, apart from that gender flip itself there...

The world of Clement Virgo’s Steal Away  is intentionally nebulous. I spent a good chunk of the first act trying to figure out when and where it was set -the 1950s or the 1980s, in the European countryside or the antebellum south; the guards looking for refugees make no mention of what country they represent and they have vague accents -though the central white family is American, and there are constant references to a ‘north’ that might be safer for people in flight. Only the fact that Cécile (Mallori Johnson), and her family and retinue hail from the Congo is made for certain. This ambiguity is meant to give the movie a fairy tale-like atmosphere -it’s subtitle is ‘A Tale of Two Princesses’ -in reference to Cécile and Fanny (Angourie Rice) the white teenage daughter of the family safeguarding Cécile, and who is drawn in several ways as a counterpoint sister to. There are moments where the movie really does achieve that sense of mystique, appropriate for the highly allegorica...

Often the best romance movies, and consequently the hardest to make in this day and age, are those that express and invite no cynicism whatsoever. That are big and brash in their statements and conceits without needing to disarm the audience, and that will sometimes set aside logic to be driven on pure feeling. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey  requires you to buy into the notion of a magic GPS connecting soulmates, for those soulmates to follow it mostly without question into the strange and bizarre flights of fancy it sets out for them, and that these involve literally living out past events of their lives to convey a better sense of their identities and desires. This movie in these and other respects evokes strong comparison to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , but unlike that film there is no in-universe rational explanation for the experiences of its characters. They just take it as they go, and it is something of a big bold risk for director Kogonada to set out his film tha...

You just couldn’t make it up. A landmark of its genre, one could say that  This is Spinal Tap , the 1984 rockumentary from director Marty DiBergi chronicling the titular heavy metal band’s infamous Smell the Glove  tour, subsequent break-up, and eventual reunion, was a watershed for both the music and movie industries. It’s impact is quite clear, the presentational style of its interviews and filmmaking a common one to be found all over TV and film today, and it remains a favourite movie among many popular musicians -both those that new the band personally and who have come up since -who can relate to its raw portrait of band dysfunction and battling egos. In spite of this, the cult impact has not translated to substantial success for the band, whose best remembered songs remain those from about forty years ago and who until the events detailed by this film had not played together since 2010 -in large part owing to an ambiguous rift between frontman David St. Hubbins and ...

In spite of its far-future setting, Futurama  has always been a show in conversation with the present and sometimes in very glaring ways. Yet I don’t think it has ever been so overtly preachy as in “The World is Hot Enough”. To be clear, this is by design, the episode was no doubt structured to be a dressing down through both satire and direct confrontation of our world’s lack of climate action and the irreversible harm that is being done to both the planet and its ability to sustain us. The ‘Climatastrophy’ -a seeming apocalypse from about the mi d -21 st  century- is nebulously alluded to several times through the episode and what the people of that time could have done were they not so stupid. It is oftentimes very fair, the derisiveness this episode demonstrates towards modern humanity and it makes for a novelty -though it lacks the sharpness and punch of say, the message episodes of BoJack Horseman , or even a few of Futurama ’s earlier ones. And beyond that premise there...

The Long Walk  has the distinction of being Stephen King’s first story. Though it was his sixth book published (the second under his Richard Bachman pseudonym), he began it in college several years before the likes of Carrie , Salem’s Lot , and The Shinin g. And one can certainly tell -it is a fairly simple and sustained horror premise -and the kind of story you might expect as a short-term narrative for something like The Twilight Zone . Very characteristic of King’s style and interests but in a blunter form than his novels would come to take on. Just like every other work of his it has long been pursued for a movie adaptation. Frank Darabont - whose career was so intertwined with King’s - was at one point heavily considering it; but the version that did make it to screen comes appropriately from Francis Lawrence, director of all but one of the Hunger Games  movies, a franchise clearly built on a similar conceptual foundation (and perhaps even partially inspired by The Long W...

Those of us outside of Japan can never understand enough just how monumental the impact of the bombs were. Beyond their horrifying devastation, the mass crime against humanity with tangible reverberations for decades, the culture of Japan and the Japanese was irrevocably changed. Kazuo Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki, understood this intimately when he wrote his acclaimed debut novel A Pale View of Hills . Speaking of its 2025 adaptation, its director Kei Ishikawa noted the similarity of a vital secondary character, an old professor who stays with his son and daughter-in-law for a time, to the more iconic Stevens of Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day  -a man of a rapidly disintegrating era tragically incapable of adapting to a shifting world. It is an apt comparison, though I would note more the similarity to a handful of figures from classic films by Yasujiro Ozu -often played by Chishū Ryū or Nakamura Ganjirō- who face the same struggles but are in direct contra...