Reviews of the Bosch

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” The line that is ubiquitous with the movie Love Story  is also perhaps the most mocked line in the romance movie genre. A line that sounds sweet and poetic -and certainly in context- but is meaningfully empty and kind of just flat-out false when applied to anything beyond a very narrow scope of subjects that comprise what we might call ‘love’. Even just two years later, Peter Bogdanovich had Ryan O’Neal (who delivers the line in its second usage in this film) respond to the quote with “that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard” in the film What’s Up, Doc? Bogdanovich and O’Neal had no qualms making fun of it then, because the movie’s power in spite of it was already assured. Love Story  was the first monster hit of the 1970s. It was the highest-grossing movie of 1970 and one of the highest-grossing movies of all time up to that point (it is still in the top fifty adjusted for inflation). It is said to have revived the Hollywood mel...

My favourite movie to fixate (at least in some regard) on the Japanese art of kabuki theatre is Yasujiro Ozu's Floating Weeds , about a kabuki troupe in a seaside village. Kabuki is by its nature a very broad art form, full of zealous expressions of emotion and highly melodramatic storytelling, each epitomized in its distinct style of make-up and dance. It is a compelling thing to watch, but so is by contrast the lives of its performers and their relationship to the art -as Floating Weeds  does, following a veteran performer whose career has estranged him from his son. This character was played by Nakamura Ganjiro II, a dedicated kabuki performer himself from a family famous for it. And he appears to be represented at least symbolically in the film Kokuho , likewise about the dramatic personal life of a kabuki actor, in which the trainer and consultant was Ganjiro's own grandson and namesake. Directed by Lee Sang-il and currently the highest-grossing live-action film in Japan, ...

Some movies meet their moment effectively. John Patton Ford’s How to Make a Killing  is not one of them. Maybe if the 2020s were a little more like the 1930s its subject matter on the entitled pursuit of immense wealth would be worthy escapism for a broadly economically disadvantaged audience. Maybe it would in any case and it’s just this movie that has a hard time selling it authentically. It could be the attitude of the script or of Glen Powell’s performance, but there is something a little uncomfortably arrogant to this movie that renders its supposed virtues disingenuous. This in spite of some real energy there is to it. How to Make a Killing  is a modern remake of the classic British Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets , in which an underdog distant heir to a vast fortune systematically kills off the relatives ahead of him in the line of inheritance. A key difference though is that the earlier film is notable for having all of the eccentric relatives played by a s...

Whatever one might think of Emerald Fennel’s new Wuthering Heights , it should at least be clear that the novel by Emily Brontë is not exactly the “classy” work of literature it is often presumed to be. Though it has had that veneer impressed upon it by its era and literary quality, Wuthering Heights  was pretty scandalous for its time -certainly more so than the other books by the Brontë sisters. It dealt in direct themes of class and abuse, featured characters (or at least one) who are incredibly morally ambiguous, and had greater sexual connotations in its central romance than a lot of mainstream fiction of the time. Wuthering Heights has always been scandalous, if perhaps not to the degree that Fennel brings. It is by design not a very faithful adaptation -at least in the details. The quotation marks around the title apparently are a clue to the fact it is more inspired by the idea of Wuthering Heights  than a direct adaptation. Although that is not a p...

Crime 101  is probably the nearest thing a modern Hollywood blockbuster can get to something like Heat . That is largely a compliment though it is a touch backhanded in terms of both a few of the things the movie holds back on and the Hollywood environment it is produced within. Clearly director Bart Layton is inspired by Heat , with this being an L.A.-set crime film about a master thief and the cop trying to track him down. I suppose the pairing of Pacino and De Niro has its Gen-Z analogue in casting two Avengers in these respective roles. But the movie, which is based on a work by Don Winslow, does have some genuine ideas and aesthetics of its own, limited in some respects but very interesting in others. The movie follows three main threads that eventually intersect and inform each other. Chris Hemsworth plays Mike, a meticulous and successful though deeply lonely jewel thief who has been evading authorities for years. However his style of robbery and penchant for avoiding violen...

The reverberations from   Everything Everywhere All at Once  were slow, but they have at last arrived, at least to some degree, with Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die , the first movie since that sensation of 2022 to go for a similarly eccentric high concept built on some degree of absurdism with a deeper and very conscious meaning underpinning its world and stakes. It is directed by Gore Verbinski -his first movie in nine years- and it is fittingly wild and silly in the vein of his Pirates of the Caribbean  movies (especially the latter two), but its unique concept and stalwart thematic integrity comes courtesy of screenwriter Matthew Robinson. Both, it would seem, have a bone to pick with the technological dependency of the modern world -with A.I. and virtual reality specifically and what it all means for the future of humanity. Their outlook is bleak, but at least there's some fun to be had in the possibly vain effort to amend it. The movie opens with Sam Rockwell as...

Tribute acts are a strange little corner of the music world. Out in the barrens (such as where I live) where major musical artists rarely travel, they are indeed a suitable and cheap alternative to experiencing the real thing. And especially for older folks, fans of artists either very aged or deceased, there’s a nostalgic pleasure to seeing people dressing up in 60s or 70s clothes and singing the songs of their youth. But this is not a steady or particularly lucrative demographic, and there is something unavoidably cheesy about tribute acts, especially of the boomer music variety. They tend to embody the has-been nature of the subjects incredibly starkly. And they’re typically not really thought of as musical artists in their own right, relying on songs by other people (that are often easy enough for a competent musician to learn) rather than taking a risk on anything new or personal. A movie at the scale and style of Craig Brewer’s Song Sung Blue  would be more likely to feature ...

Dracula  has been adapted so many times and so many different ways that new interpretations are not only inevitable but necessary. And it is possible to re-theme the story, which does involve the title character pursuing a specific woman, as a romance. Both the 1979 film by John Badham and the 1992 film by Francis Ford Coppola leaned into a theme of Mina Harker being the reincarnation of Dracula’s long-lost lover and casting his interests in her therefore as a human impulse of romantic reunion. It is a tenuous pretense to make work, the predatory nature of the Dracula character not something that translates easily to authentic notions of love -and to even attempt it one must be confident in their portrait of the vampire -resting in the aforementioned cases on the sexual charisma of a figure like Gary Oldman or especially Frank Langella. Dracula , the 2025 French film going for an even greater scope of romantic melodrama, casts Caleb Landry Jones -a character actor known for his uns...

Rainer Werner Fassbinder really knew how to make the most of a set-piece, huh? There is one scene under the opening credits of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant that is a distinct exterior shot. Everything else across a great span of time takes place in the gaudy apartment of the titular character, adorned with nude statuettes and a giant painting on the wall behind the bed of the Nicolas Poussin piece Midas and Bacchus  -a highly symbolic work for the purposes of the story, uniting the famous Greek hedonist with the king so ubiquitous with wealth and status he could turn anything into gold. Their avatars are women here, but function in a similar way, including in their curious relationship to each other. It is somewhat comforting to see a movie from 1972 that is not only about a lesbian romance but a very messy lesbian romance. It’s nearest analogue may be The Killing of Sister George  from four years prior, but that film was a lot more campy and treated its same-sex relatio...