Reviews of the Bosch

Terms of Endearment  and Broadcast News  are a pair of movies so good they leave an outsize impression on the directorial career of James L. Brooks. Brooks’s legacy in general is of course multi-faceted and highly secure -especially as the creator or producer of several of the most influential TV comedies of the last fifty-plus years. Specifically as a film director though he set the bar high, winning an Oscar on his debut movie. But it has been a long time since 1983, the film industry has changed dramatically. That was perhaps already apparent by 2010, when Brooks made his sixth film, How Do You Know , which was much more of a conventional romantic-comedy compared to usual tenor of his movies. Seemingly, he retired after that effort alongside one of its stars Jack Nicholson. But now out of the blue, fifteen years later, he has returned with Ella McCay  -a primarily political comedy, even more bizarre and out-of-step in its efforts to simultaneously capture some of Brook...

The Mastermind  is as pure a throwback movie as they come. From the opening scene of a man scouting out an art museum while discreetly robbing one of the diorama exhibits set to tense and rising jazz band music, the movie demonstrates its evocations with precision, and a strong helping of charm. Director Kelly Reichardt is clearly enamoured with crime thrillers of the 1960s and 70s, particularly French films like Le Samouri  and Pickpocket , but also in some aspects of atmosphere American films by folks like Sydney Pollack and Alan J. Pakula. The movie is set in 1970s Massachusetts and certainly feels of a piece with that era in choices Reichardt makes to emphasize it. But it is not just the stylistic calling cards that keep this movie compelling -it is also the manner of its protagonist and his actions. His name is J.B. Mooney, played by Josh O'Connor, a young unemployed family patriarch and a former art graduate, who uses borrowed money from his parents -not to find or estab...

I really enjoy a good afterlife riff. Whether it is something poignant like A Matter of Life and Death , After Life , or Nine Days  or something lighter like Defending Your Life , Soul , or The Good Place , it’s ample ground to both have fun and speculate on the meaning and totality of our existence. We don’t know what awaits us on the other side if anything at all, and so these kind of stories are a good way of reckoning with those questions while on earth. It’s also a space for tremendous creativity. Eternity , a movie by David Freyne, isn’t particularly creative -at least not in its approach to the breadth and architecture of its fairly bureaucratic afterlife, which has shades of several of the examples listed. But what it does do interestingly is present a scenario that none of these other films had really yet thought of. What if David Niven’s character wasn’t able to come back to Kim Hunter and had to wait for her to pass and be united with him again? What if she had found las...

Nora Borg is a really good stage actress. She is celebrated for it, commended on it, and she can fully engage her audience. But she is incredibly uncomfortable in the theatre, she suffers bouts of anxiety and stage fright that threaten opening nights. It is an inconvenience to say the least. One might think she could transition away from the medium into film and television where her subtle emotional performance style would also be more welcome. But one gets the sense she can’t do that -to move into movies and television is to move into the realm of her father, and that would make her ten times more uncomfortable. The intricacies of this estrangement, both spoken about and alluded to, is the pillar that Joachim Trier builds his astounding new movie Sentimental Value on. A movie about fractured family relationships, family history, and the uneasy work of turning life and trauma into art, it is among the most tender and quietly moving films I’ve seen in recent years -a trait it shares wit...

“What if it wasn’t worth it?” George Clooney is not Jay Kelly. But there is a degree of George Clooney in Jay Kelly. And vice versa. Their acting careers started about the same time and have gone in similar directions (strikingly so as we eventually see), and they are both at a point now where they are globally recognized superstar celebrities. And it is perhaps true of both that they find it exhausting. The biggest point of divergence is in their personal lives -Clooney does not have the grown daughters estranged from him that Jay does, and is not plagued with guilt over neglecting them. But you can believe he fears he might have in this alternate version of his life. There have long been movies about how stardom is a difficult thing for a person, but director Noah Baumbach hits at it more pointedly than most. He and Clooney, along with co-writer Emily Mortimer, tap into some very honest aspects of the supposed emptiness of not just celebrity but aging celebrity -a head space where re...

If you were to guess based off the name Whit Stillman what kind of movie he would direct, you would probably come up with something approximating Metropolitan . Both he and his film feel like they would be most comfortable in the Edwardian era and the comedy of manners sensibilities of P.G. Wodehouse. He apparently did intend the film not to be set in the modern day, but didn’t have the budget enough to convincingly replicate a period setting. But of course his characters, barring just a couple, all feel ripped from another time and place -posh and aristocratic in a way I can’t imagine even the most egregious elites of the modern day trying to keep up. But then, that itself is a notable facet of the film. The movie is set in the midst of ‘debutante season’ on the Upper East Side of New York -which coincides with Christmas- and follows an outsiders view into the insular lives and traditions of a crew of wealthy young socialites. Due to a mix-up, an educated but middle-class Princeton st...

The culmination of some thirty years of a cultural exportation boom that has come to be known as the Korean Wave is  KPop Demon Hunters . After all the ubiquity of KPop bands and K-dramas, Parasite  winning at the Oscars, and Squid Game  at the Emmys, Korean culture has so cemented itself internationally that Korea doesn’t even need to be involved anymore. KPop Demon Hunters  is an American movie, produced by Sony Pictures Animation for Netflix, conceived and directed by Korean-Canadian Maggie Kang, and featuring a cast of American and Canadian actors and singers of the Korean diaspora (with the notable exception of Lee Byung-hun as the film’s primary villain). And yet despite a lack of production connection to South Korea, it has enjoyed as much if not more popularity than other products of the Korean Wave. A significant statement on how encompassing Korean cultural trends and aesthetics have become within other popular cultures worldwide. KPop Demon Hunters  i...

The Disney that created Zootopia  in 2016 is very different from the Disney that just produced its sequel in 2025. By Disney standards it’s not so long of a stretch ( The Rescuers Down Under  came thirteen years after its predecessor by which point the audience for it had evaporated), but they feel a world apart. In 2016 Disney was still riding high off the resurgence Tangled  and Frozen had given the studio -though shortly after it the studio entered a long creative slump it remains in the midst of, wherein it has been very hesitant  to take a chance on a new idea. Zootopia 2  is the fourth animated sequel of the last seven years -and though it is on the heels of Moana 2  (and is likely to be at least a fraction as successful), there’s not much in it to turn the tides of Disney’s current rather lacklustre reputation on its animation front. Zootopia  was always a bit of a gimmick idea to begin with, and the earlier movie went pretty far with that...

It must be bizarre for people in Japan or Korea to see movies made about mundane aspects of society for them though filtered through an American lens that is astounded by them. The rental family is one of those concepts -a not uncommon service in Japan whereby actors are hired to play a friend or family member for a client for reasons ranging from social etiquette to companionship to a means of working through grief. And it is something that feels strange and even unethical to many a westerner, especially for those aspects that require deception or that interact with sex work outside the traditional purview of acting. To impose that moral judgement from a western perspective would be arrogant and condescending -as though we have any real high ground to stand on. That is why it is important that Rental Family , a movie basically designed to teach westerners about this thing, is directed by a Japanese filmmaker, whose own assessment of the service is thus unclouded by cultural bias. Hika...