Reviews of the Bosch

Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown  is not based on any particular run of Peanuts  strips and that is why it feels so different from the prior two movies. Charlie Brown had gone to camp before, but usually on his own -or with just as Snoopy as a companion. Charles Schulz wrote this original screenplay however based on a rafting trip he took with his family -and being written as a film it is notably less episodic than its predecessors had been, which were working in daily gags and merely expanding on certain scenes and plot beats. And it does feel a little bit like alien territory for a Peanuts  movie. Certainly it is an alien environment -the movie being set in the wilderness of what looks like Utah or Wyoming rather than the humble Minnesotan world the strip usually occupies. It’s interesting seeing these characters against watercolour backdrops of forests and mountains and deep canyons. And this context is the biggest novelty for the movie, the background of an elaborate...

Keeper is a movie that was entirely written, produced, and shot in a period of about five months while production on   The Monkey  was on hold due to the 2023 Hollywood labour strikes, and it shows. Essentially it was an excuse to keep the predominantly Canadian crew working during this time, director Osgood Perkins also hiring a non-WGA Canadian writer Nick Lepard to draft the screenplay and casting the film with Canadian actors such as Tatiana Maslany -who could perform in it under her ACTRA membership while temporarily waiving her SAG-AFTRA status. A bit of a sneaky way around the labour dispute for Perkins, but it did allow his crew in Canada to not lose work -which is nice for them. It doesn’t make the movie they were working on any better though. Unsurprisingly for a film that was designed as a rush job, the premise is incredibly basic. Maslany stars as Liz, a woman celebrating her anniversary with her partner Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), a fairly wealthy and successful ...

Not counting the broadcast season breaks during the Comedy Central run (and the status of “Overclockwise” as the real season six finale over “Reincarnation”), “The White Hole” may be the first season finale of Futurama since “The 30% Iron Chef” more than twenty years ago that does not feel like it was written as a potential series finale. Sure it is pretty grand in scope, but largely uses that canvas for jokes, rather than the notes of sincerity or profundity. Also it lacks that focus on Fry and Leela, which has long been a staple of closing episodes. There is something a little refreshing there, that the writers know they have at least one more season to produce and so don’t feel the obligation to put a lot of weight into this one, though it still has a bit of an air of that in places. Written by series veteran Patric M. Verrone, the central tenet of the episode is a White Hole that suddenly appears over Earth and a voice from within beckoning representatives from this universe to ent...

There was a TV miniseries called Nuremberg I remember watching in high school history class as a way of teaching us students about the Nuremberg T rials. It featured Alec Baldwin and Christopher Plummer, and I remember Brian Cox was Herman G ö ring -the most significant figure of those hearings  pretty much exactly as he wanted. The Nazi Reichsmarschall, last of Hitler’s innermost circle not to commit suicide before answering for his crimes, wanted to be the main character of that chapter of history regardless of what happened to him. Much as the trials were designed to diminish and discredit the Nazis, it can be argued their effect historically was more complex. That’s not what James Vanderbilt’s movie Nuremberg  believes, much as it gives credence to the complicated aspects of the Nuremberg Trials in terms of their apparent goal. Vanderbilt sees such a thing as purveyor of drama, but doesn’t seem to take seriously its validity all that much. His movie’s attitude towards Nure...

When it comes to the subjects of her movies, Lynne Ramsey does not take any half measures. Whether it is the frankness of a parent alienated from her psychopathic child in We Need to Talk About Kevin  or the unrelenting viciousness of a hitman systematically killing the architects of a sex trafficking ring in You Were Never Really Here , her approach is never subtle or expected. And that is especially true of her latest film, Die My Love , which tackles a subject very rarely discussed on film -postpartum depression- and accentuates it to the most visceral extremes. Profoundly bizarre and disorienting, and very much because of this profoundly effective. Jennifer Lawrence stars as Grace, who moves with her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) from New York City to a small house in the woods in his home of rural Montana. In a frenetic montage that is probably the best opening sequence of the year we get a sense of their joy-filled early days in this place filled with sex,...

Charlie Brown has always been the lead character of Peanuts , but since virtually the beginning of the strip, and especially so after the edges of his design were rounded off and he became more cute, Snoopy has been the breakout star. In the world of comics only Garfield could rival Snoopy for popularity (and Jim Davis was way more cynical about pursuing that for his character than Charles Schulz). Everybody loves Snoopy, the hyper-imaginative, romantic, intellectual, and sarcastic beagle, and it seemed only natural that for a second  Peanuts  movie, especially when A Boy Named Charlie Brown  was so fixated on its title character, the focus would be on Snoopy. Snoopy Come Home  is primarily based on a storyline from 1968 in which Snoopy receives a letter from a mysterious girl called Lila and leaves Charlie Brown without explanation -puzzling his owner and the other kids. The purpose of Snoopy’s journey we come to find is to visit his previous owner in the hospital, ...

  There are several significant time jumps in the movie Christy , some of which are hard to appreciate given how little seems to change in how the characters look and behave -a twenty-one year time span might seem like only five. But what is implicitly happening through the long interims is very important. Each leap is rough for how it emphasizes just how deep and inescapable a situation Christy Martin is in. The claustrophobia is very aptly felt. And none of it has to do with her boxing career. It is a sports biopic in which the sport is almost incidental -merely the anchor and backdrop for a harrowing story of abuse and manipulation. In fact it is treated as a downright thriller in some instances by director David Michôd -unsurprisingly for the man behind Animal Kingdom . But then it is an appropriate approach in light of the unique nature of its subject’s story -at least unique in a public sense and her particular region of celebrity. What Christy Martin went through i...

Though the Predator franchise owes a lot to its elder brother Alien , it’s titular monster could never command quite the same kind of horror. The Alien is a distinctly unrelatable creature in every facet and stage of development, while the Predator, though vicious, is much more humane in both physiology and anthropology. The Predators have technology, language, culture, and an extremely clear motivation as game hunters -they aren’t so unknowable in concept. It doesn’t mean they can’t and haven’t been scary, but it did make them the easier party to slot into a protagonist-adjacent role when the two franchises were finally brought together in Alien vs. Predator . After that, the next several movies kept them restored to formidable enemy status -most successfully so in Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey , the series’ high-point. But clearly Trachtenberg is very compelled by the Predator as more than the ruthless hunter, and in Predator: Badlands , as far-removed a follow-up in both context and focus...

I kind of wonder if writer David A. Goodman, or whoever actually conceived this episode, got the idea from the movie   Pig . Certainly the relationship that develops between Bender and his little pig Jambone feels reminiscent. “The Trouble with Truffles” is a pretty decent outing for most of its run -though the ending is quite slap-dash in a way that really doesn’t work. But it does well with its new concept and plot, a far better one for Bender than he has gotten in a while. Given he starts the episode underneath Fry and Leela as they’re making out, that alone is something. Though he tells them to get lost he winds up crashing their date anyways at a new and very exclusive Elzar restaurant where despite uncertainty at the expense (“it’s market price” says Elzar), they have some truffles with their food and the experience is orgasmic. But as always, truffles are a delicacy, and Fry is faced with a bill somewhere in the thousands that is kindly but suspiciously paid off by the Robot...