Reviews of the Bosch

It is a good time for the Modern Prometheus. Though I sadly wasn’t able to get in to see it while there, one of the biggest hits at this year’s Toronto Film Festival was the long-awaited Guillermo del Toro adaptation of Frankenstein . For the man whose made the theme of monsters his bread and butter and whose debut feature Cronos  was very Frankenstein -esque it seems a perfect pairing of filmmaker and subject. But he’s not the only one at the moment drawn to the classic literary creature. Maggie Gyllenhaal has her own revisionist take on the story called The Bride  coming out early next year, which itself in its apparent feminist themes seems to be taking up the baton of another recent film that heavily owes a debt to the work, Poor Things . More than two centuries after Mary Shelley wrote her cautionary tale about playing god, her creation -much like Victor Frankenstein’s- is still so much more powerful than she could have imagined. We are still obsessed with it today. ...

In 1993, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro made his directing debut with an interesting movie called Cronos , a tragedy about a man who is turned into a monster in his attempt to hold onto life. In my review from a few years ago , I called it ‘del Toro’s Frankenstein ’. In actuality, it was merely the first step in a decades-long journey towards the real thing. The filmmaker who has made his sympathy towards apparent monsters his signature thematic calling card has had Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein  as a kind of north star through all of his stories of gothic fantasy, grotesque creatures, and the consequences of misunderstanding them. He has refined and perfected his formula in building to this great end, a desired magnum opus. Frankenstein is of course a towering work to tackle, though it has been more than thirty years since the last major cinematic adaptation of the original story (and that one, Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , though quite loyal to the book was ...

I would not have expected the “Pizzagate” episode of this season of Futurama  to be the one I was most amused by, but at this stage in the show I’m very happy to be surprised. As far as direct analogues to real world culture and politics go, this is a subject I would expect the show to do better with than the pandemic or “cancel culture” -I feel like the writers actually understand its absurdity and could find a way to extrapolate on it in a warped Futurama  way. The result isn’t so bold as I would like, and it gets tangled a bit in bureaucracy, but that is perfectly okay when the humour is there. “Murderoni” actually starts in a place that seems irrelevant to the main plot but ultimately won’t be: Hermes sending Dwight off for his first day in the Young Bureaucrats Club, which Dwight proceeds to ditch immediately after getting on the bus. None the wiser, Hermes takes the gang out for pizza, to Blek and Blazucchi’s (which has relocated from its former residence across the stre...

It’s only fitting, given Wolf Man was the worst movie I saw from the early months of this year that come Halloween I actually get around to watching the original film for the first time. Of course George Waggner’s The Wolf Man from 1941 is not quite the classic that Tod Browning’s Dracula  or James Whale’s Frankenstein were  -which set the standard for both monster movies and horror movies for a good few decades. Though unlike those, The Wolf Man  had no literary source, and as a monster was an original creation. Curt Siodmak’s script is quite impressive, establishing well its unique setting and building a compelling lore that has become very standard for werewolf fiction. That stands out about the film where its rough-around-the-edges performances and effects leave it trailing its older brothers. Well that of course and the make-up, which as with Frankenstein  is remarkable in how effortlessly distinct it is, and much more elaborate than what Boris Karloff or his s...

Luca Guadagnino had a fantastic 2024. It doesn't often happen anymore that a director releases two movies in a single year to the quality of both Challengers  and Queer , but he did it. And that two-punch appears to be just the start of a momentum he is riding high. His name has been prospectively attached to a new version of Lord of the Flies  and a remake of American Psycho , his next project is going to be the Sam Altman movie -he is one of the busiest filmmakers in Hollywood right now. But the pedigree his name has carried may be in jeopardy and his run of triumph ended if After the Hunt  is any indication. Maybe his successes have gotten to him, maybe this movie is just demonstrative of contentious proclivities that were always there but have gone unnoticed, or maybe he just needed writer Justin Kuritzkes -who penned both of last years’ films- more than we realized (this script is credited to one Nora Garrett), but for the first time it really feels like th...

Manuel Puig's  Kiss of the Spider Woman  makes for an awkward musical, let alone a movie musical. It is a depressing story about two men incarcerated and abused by an authoritarian regime set entirely in a prison -most of it in one prison cell. Sure there are recurring flights of escapist fancy through a storytelling device of one recounting to the other a favourite movie -but it is a Nazi propaganda film. Several ingredients primes for a dour, tasteless musical almost in the vein of "Springtime for Hitler". Regardless, it was in fact produced in 1992, by luminaries Kander and Ebb and Terrence McNally no less, and was a relative success. And now, perhaps to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the acclaimed  film version that inspired the show to begin with, comes a movie adaptation that lays clear the musical's flaws while adding a few of its own -yet being appealingly garish in other regards. After the 1985 movie transferred context to the military dictatorshi...