Reviews of the Bosch

As I stated more than a month ago , 2025 was a particularly good year for movies, producing multiple films destined to become classics. The Academy Awards celebrating those films was perhaps not quite reflective of the bombast that might deserve, but that was okay. The Oscars are meant to be a ceremony not a spectacle, and it feels like it has taken some time for them to fully understand that. The spectacle is certainly still there in some respects -hello, grand elaborate performances of “I Lied to You” and “Golden”- but it does feel more earnestly about the honouring of artists itself, if maybe reluctantly so. A few times through the night where the music was cutting off a winner’s speech it soon cut back to them to let them finish. I wonder if the stigma against the show’s producers from the artistic community and the Oscars’ chief viewership might have spooked them? Or maybe it was just Conan O’Brien refusing to play along. Conan proved a fantastic host at last years’ Oscars -a nat...

If you look deeply and between the lines, there is a profound sentiment at the heart of Pixar’s Hoppers . All nature, animals and humans, exist in symbiosis with each other, and the preservation of that natural contract depends on empathy and working together for the good of everyone and everything. It is a notion that we should all be able to get behind. But one person’s good is sadly not everybody’s. And though director and story architect Daniel Chong may disagree, not everyone can be compelled to do the right thing. Especially in the world of environmentalism and conservation, fights are rarely won (and then only pyrrhically) through compromise. He may understand this himself, his film openly notes the inconsistency of the laws that make up “Pond Rules”, but he is happy not to interrogate that for the sake of his broader theme. It’s a real shame because the film suffers for it. It’s not the only problem with this film, though it is rather blatant. Even in this very formless era...

Ever since she famously screamed in terror at the appearance of her apparent husband-to-be as her first act of consciousness, the Bride of Frankenstein has been a feminine icon of the horror genre. To some degree it was inevitable -she was one of the only female movie monsters of the classic era, and none that came after quite equaled her intensity of presence and her singular look, even with very little screen-time in the movie named for her. The Bride of Frankenstein does not appear in Mary Shelley’s novel, but that hasn’t stopped the character from being linked to Shelley -in the framing device of the 1935 movie, which posits the character was always intended to be part of the story and its moral theme; and in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! , which suggests even more overtly the same. Of course in one sense it is putting words in the mouth of Shelley, in another it is casting her as an avatar for Gyllenhaal herself and a kind of quasi-feminist statement more broadly. It is very artf...

Very little happens in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days  -the movie that is. And what does happen is taken very mildly -the most significant developments to its plot take place off-screen, and the characters’ emotions even around harsh themes are subdued. And yet the film has a power to it, akin to something like Jeanne Dielman  -the great icon of minimalist cinema- because it is perfectly in tune with the sensitivity of its subject, especially in Romania in the 1980s. Cristian Mungiu was not the first filmmaker to apply this kind of quiet and discreet tone to a film about abortion in a time and place where that form of medical care was illegal. Another movie it has a lot in common with is Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake  from 2004. But Mungiu’s 2007 film, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes that year, is undoubtedly more haunting -because it speaks not only to abortion, but the broader hostilities facing vulnerable young women in that time and place. It is 1987 in a small Romanian to...

Arco might be the most Studio Ghibli movie that Studio Ghibli never made. Certainly, it’s among the more successful attempts to imitate that peculiar magic of Ghibli in a non-Japanese culture, in both the look and the general quaint spirit of the piece. But it is also a movie that Ghibli has never made; much as it fits their mold, it does not come off as any direct derivation. And in fact, a few of its choices do genuinely stand on their own, with a degree of maturity and severity distinct even from the poetic notes of Miyazaki’s best films, up to and including the bittersweet nature of the ending. The movie is French and directed by Ugo Bienvenu, though it comes to North America with an English dub courtesy of Natalie Portman, one of its producers. The dub is fine -very much like those latter Ghibli films- but it is sad to lose the likes of Swann Arlaud and Louis Garrel to Mark Ruffalo and America Fererra. The two children however seem to retain much of their original innocence with u...