Reviews of the Bosch

Live-action sitcoms about kids tend to not be very good. I grew up in arguably the golden age of this genre on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon (and their awkward Canadian cousin, The Family Channel), and I certainly enjoyed my fair share of them - Drake & Josh , Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide , and even That’s So Raven being particular favourites. But their appeal was in their pre-teen to teenage representation and the sense of fun they extolled while still being somewhat relatable to the ordinary kid’s life and patterns. They were never of high mark when it came to the writing, directing, humour, and acting, and you would have to be very generous to argue that point as an adult bereft of nostalgia or cherry-picked examples to the contrary.  I feel like I was somewhat aware of this at the time, but didn’t care. Kids need to see these kind of stories from their perspective on-screen. That alone matters. These shows were sequestered away on TV networks designed for a...

David Lowery is really underrated when it comes to the great visual filmmakers of the modern era. Between The Green Knight and his new film Mother Mary he has brought forth some of the most striking, exquisite images I’ve ever seen at the movies (and hell, there are even a few stupendous ones in A Ghost Story ). I would honestly not be surprised if the inspiration for Mother Mary  originated with the conception of its stills and pictures, and that the story itself was crafted around them. And I would not be bothered by that fact. Mother Mary  is a very enigmatic film, with a hallowed reverence for its subject matter -pop stardom and aesthetics- that may in other hands feel inappropriate. And it makes a few turns that are in the moment discombobulating, and that take some time to reconcile.  Yet the movie’s reality is fairly easily fluid, its shifts into psychological, spiritual corners not so alien or unwelcome as they may look on paper. A hypnotizing tone makes allowanc...

A movie about mental illness made in the 1940s is bound to not hold up to modern psychological scrutiny. Hell, even psychological scrutiny within a decade or so of its release. To watch The Snake Pit  is to get a glimpse into how mental illness was perceived and treated in a time when it was barely understood and entirely stigmatized. Often, contemporary films that would depict conditions we might now identify as schizophrenia or psychosis would cast them as markers of someone to be either feared or pitied. Rarely was the subject addressed head-on and taken seriously. It was considered uncouth to do so. But by 1948, in the aftermath of the war and new concepts arising around PTSD and other traumas, perhaps Hollywood was ready to actually go there -or rather director Anatole Litvak was, who’d personally bought the rights to the novel of the same name by Mary Jane Ward and worked to make a film that would be empathetic towards people -though women especially- interred in asylums for ...

I think director Lee Cronin was way more interested in making an exorcism movie than a mummy movie, and the resulting attempt to pound a square peg into a round hole is not a very enthralling version of either. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy  -a title choice it should be made clear came from the producers- seems to have a largely passive interest in mummification, ancient Egypt, and the other typical aspects of mummy horror stories -and that is by design. Cronin thought the notion of an average, relatable character being mummified was more frightening than just the mummy itself being a monster that stalks the protagonists. And that is a fair point and a curious place to come at a new version of The Mummy  from. But the creativity to both the story and the horror mostly stops at that point. The titular Mummy of this film is more of a possessing spirit than an entity in its own right, sustained through generations via a sacrificial host. We first meet it in the basement of an Egyptian f...

In pitching her book about Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill , Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira) is asked by her publisher why she is the person to write it -what insight does she specifically have, and what can she distinctly bring to the subject? Presumably the album means a lot to her -Grace says as much when she first brings up the idea. So she should share how it has impacted and informed her life as evidence of its lasting legacy. Grace takes this all in …and then it never manifests anywhere afterwards. It might as well be any album she is writing about. Director Chandler Levack apparently based a lot of this movie, Mile End Kicks , on her own personal experiences -so perhaps on this note she didn’t actually learn much from it. Maybe that is harsh, the Morrissette piece is not the vital part of the story -it is the catalyst. But it is an awfully specific one, and is given an undue degree of attention through a handful of sequences of the movie -and yet Grace’s relationship to it...

Jane Austen and Mark Twain both left their final novels unfinished. Orson Welles didn’t live to see the completion of his swansong . Bach and Beethoven and dozens of classical composers began works they never lived to see to fruition. Painters like Benjamin West and J.M.W. Turner left behind work they were only in the middle of. And ironically enough, Robert William Buss as well -a grand portrait of the figure and stories of Charles Dickens, who likewise penned a final mystery unsolved. Incomplete masterpieces are common among great artists -who die, get waylaid, or lose inspiration. And yet the value in these works is tremendous. The notion of actually finishing them a daunting one. Should someone else dare to make that attempt? Can they? That question is of tremendous importance in The Christophers , the latest movie from Steven Soderbergh, written by Ed Solomon; and one that does feel uniquely personal to both -even as it comes at a time where Soderbergh seems strangely detached fro...

It should be stated clear upfront, You, Me & Tuscany  is one of those romantic-comedies made purely to showcase hot people falling in love against a gorgeous scenic backdrop. The last movie of that variety I saw, Anyone But You , interspersed it with a loose Shakespeare adaptation, but that itself played perfectly into the standard rom-com enemies-to-lovers trope. You, Me & Tuscany , directed by Kat Coiro, doesn’t have a classic literary element to it, but engages in the tried and true fantasy of the young woman travelling to an exotic locale where she is swept off her feet by a handsome stranger. There’s nothing wrong with that premise as a generic starting block, the bones to something more. But this is a movie that doesn’t really have much more despite its efforts to carve something of a unique situation into it. Halle Bailey stars as Anna, a cook turned house-sitter in New York who meets an Italian man called Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor) in a bar one night after losing...