Reviews of the Bosch

For a director who has often been associated with extra-terrestrials (to the point one of his most famous movies is named after the subject), Steven Spielberg hasn’t actually made many movies about aliens -really just four out of thirty-five. But he is a filmmaker known for spectacle and the alien movies he has made are each very interesting, reflecting his own intense curiosity with the subject of UFOs. In 1977, he related that compulsion very brazenly for the first time in Close Encounters of the Third Kind .  Nearly fifty years later, he does so again in Disclosure Day , which in some respect feels like a spiritual follow-up -the 2020s equivalent one might say. His last alien movie before this, 2005’s War of the Worlds , is also the last time he has made a movie set in and about contemporary times -having preferred historical settings for the bulk of his work in the last two decades. And like that film, Disclosure Day has the opportunity to be a commentary on the world it is ma...

If there’s anything serious movie fans know about Steven Spielberg’s personal history, it’s that his parents divorced when he was a teenager and it effected him immensely, informing several themes and parallels throughout his films. Many a Spielberg movie deals with complicated relationships between parents and children and either overtly or in the background with the subject of divorce. It’s one of the critical experiences in the life of the most renowned popular filmmaker of the past fifty years. And The Fabelmans  was always going to happen because of it. I’ve noted before how every great successful filmmaker is destined to eventually make a movie of their own life story. It’s an ego thing or a longevity thing or even just a nostalgia thing; but whichever applies here, Spielberg had apparently been thinking about it for twenty-odd years. Obviously it’s a touchy subject and required him to be in the right emotional state to take it on -that as it happened was COVID and the afterm...

Steven Spielberg has wanted to direct a musical for a long time. If you look at some of his films from the 70s and 80s, particularly 1941  and Temple of Doom  (which opens with an elaborate musical sequence) he has a clear interest in the cinematic potential of music and dance. It’s also just one of the few genres in his now six-decade spanning career that he hasn’t tried yet, and Spielberg trying something new will always be exciting. West Side Story  seems a bit of an odd beast for him to choose though. Obviously it’s been done already, and the 1961 original is widely regarded as one of the best musicals of all time. It’s an extremely beloved model that his version would be immediately compared to. At the same time, if Spielberg had to remake a famous musical, West Side Story  would probably be it -its’ youth angle and classical Hollywood romance seems to be in his wheelhouse of interest. And of course with the confidence of being penned by his recurring collaborat...

     Steven Spielberg directing Ready Player One is kind of like Stephen King writing an episode of Stranger Things . It’s just a little weird for a text that so passionately homages an individuals’ body of work to be interpreted by that individual. Ernest Cline is a Spielberg fanboy and his novel is centred around nostalgia for and celebrating a pop culture Spielberg had a heavy hand in creating. Certainly then it must have been a surreal experience for Cline. But I wonder if a reason Spielberg took on Ready Player One was once more an interest in self-reflection and self-examination. Most of the pop artefacts worshipped in the story, particularly the movie references, came about through developments in American cinema like the rise of blockbuster culture and the New Hollywood era that Spielberg, if not directly or indirectly responsible for, was on the ground level to witness. So perhaps its a reckoning that brought Spielberg on board; a desire to come to terms wi...

     It was a common trend in movies of the counterculture boom of 1960s and 70s to use a historical period as a backdrop on which to comment on the present, some of the most notable examples being Bonnie and Clyde , Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , and MASH . Though these movies were set in decades past they were really all about the contemporary era and its culture and politics.       Steven Spielberg’s The Post is much like those movies. Relating the 1971 exposure of the Pentagon Papers by the Washington Post, it’s really a movie all about the modern political climate in America, particularly as it pertains to government corruption and the stifling of free speech. And with both the movie and the context it was made in still very recent and relevant, it’s impossible and irresponsible to divorce the film from its message. That means, this review is going to get political.      The film portrays the disillusioned Daniel Ellsbe...

     It’s both a little surprising and not at all so that Spielberg had never worked with Disney until this film. Some of his movies from the 80’s and 90’s would have fit perfectly with Disney’s brand, and in fact Disney was one of the studios touted for E.T. on which they foolishly passed (this was when Disney was in just about dire straits, hard to imagine given their current empire). At the same time Spielberg is also one of the co-founders of DreamWorks, for twenty years now Disney’s biggest competition in terms of animation; and even in 2016 it must have seemed like treason to Jeffrey Katzenberg for Spielberg to go over and a make a movie for the competition.       Of course ultimately it didn’t really matter because The BFG , adapted from the classic Roald Dahl childrens’ book, was a box office bomb, the lowest grossing movie of Spielberg’s career in fact. Already it seems to have been largely forgotten, and it shouldn’t be; not just becaus...

       Spielberg has certainly gotten more overtly political in the last few years. It only makes sense, politics in America having gotten substantially more divisive in the 2010s (and wait till I get to The Post ). And throughout his career Spielberg has also demonstrated an American idealism that he’s often contrasted against the America he’s living through, most notably in The Terminal and Lincoln . He does so again with Bridge of Spies , the true story of a lawyer defending an accused Soviet spy before participating in a prisoner exchange in East Germany. Roger Ebert compared it to a John Le Carre thriller through the lens of a Frank Capra sensibility, which is an apt enough assessment. But Bridge of Spies isn’t quite as gripping or passionate as those men often made their work. indeed it’s one of Spielberg’s least remarkable movies.        In 1957 James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) is a skilled insurance lawyer tasked with defending Rudolf ...