Reviews of the Bosch

          “Like zoinks Doctor, this house is giving me the creeps!”           “Knock Knock” ( Doctor Who’s there?) is a typical haunted house story with very little else to go for it. With only the minor twist of alien involvement, though “Smile” may still be technically worse and more obnoxious, this is easily the dullest episode of Doctor Who so far this series.           Bill moves into a new house with five other students, a manor that its mysterious Landlord (David Suchet) is willing to rent cheap, but one which hasn’t seen an update since the 1930s. Once the Doctor sees it though he senses something is afoot, and it’s not long into their first night at the place that they hear unnerving noises, strange things begin happening and people start disappearing.           This episode may be difficult to review because there’s so little substance. It’s plot is incredibly generic. ...

          Damn, I really like that title!           Very much like last week’s episode was all about Vanessa, and a little of Caliban’s former life, “This World is Our Hell” was mostly focussed on Chandler. He doesn’t get the whole show to himself, but his journey is the focal point, and seeing as Chandler began the series as the audience surrogate, it’s high time he had the spotlight like this. And hey, any chance to show more of the Old West.           First off, I’ll touch on the one other storyline that featured in this episode. Frankenstein has purified Jeckyll’s serum and is again administering it to Balfour. That poor guy’s been through a lot though, couldn’t they pick someone else? Frankenstein warns his patient that all his memories of the world will be gone but surmises that’s a good thing as “it is our memories that make us monsters”. Clearly, it’s a little more than that as it’s not just Franken...

          In 1972, Werner Herzog made a film called Aguirre, the Wrath of God , which chronicled a Spanish conquistador’s descent into madness while leading a doomed expedition through the Amazon in search of El Dorado. It’s superbly shot, superbly acted, and was at the forefront of my mind a lot while watching James Gray’s The Lost City of Z , a true successor in its subject matter to Aguirre , and a film that hearkens back to a certain greatness of filmmaking that’s seen very rarely these days, and it’s immensely welcome.           Telling the real-life story of explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), the film follows him, starting from his days as a soldier training in Ireland in 1905. In 1906, he’s recruited by the Royal Geographical Society to lead a survey expedition along the Brazil-Bolivian border. While in South America he becomes enamoured with the environment and especially the clues to a rich native history ignored by t...

          Just a few weeks go I was talking about how hard it is to see Canadian movies. Well luckily, one is now available over in fairly wide release, and I highly urge you to go out and see it, not just to support Canadian film, but also because it’s really good.           If you’ve never seen a Maud Lewis painting, they’re pretty nice. And Maud Lewis herself was pretty interesting, having suffered from rheumatoid arthritis since birth, and painted all her famous works from her husband’s small hut-like house in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia. Aisling Walsh isn’t a director I’ve heard of before, but after directing Maudie , the life-story of this painter, I’ll be keeping an eye on her career in the future.           Beginning in the 1930s, Maud Dowley (Sally Hawkins) is distraught after her brother sells their family home. She determines soon after to assert her independence. When a rough standoffish fish pedd...

          It’s clear The Circle is making some statement on the social media generation and our general reliance on connectivity in a globalized world, but exactly what that is is difficult to ascertain. The film, directed by James Ponsoldt, based on the novel by Dave Eggers is all-round a curious failure of a movie, in that rather than little problems that need to be fixed, it’s only a couple, albeit major changes to its structure that would have made it work.           Mae Holland (Emma Watson) is a tech worker who manages through a friend to get a job with a behemoth internet company known as The Circle. The company’s founder Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks) preaches security, connectedness, and the growth of human progress through the new technology being pioneered there. As Mae becomes more entrenched in the world of The Circle, it becomes apparent the innovations being made are not ethical.           Emma Wa...

          I love the setting for “Thin Ice”. Of course I’m always partial to the 19th century, but a Frost Fair held on the frozen Thames is a very unique environment. It’s a great place to put the Doctor. And while the content and plot of the episode isn’t great, it works a lot better than last week’s.           The Doctor and Bill take in the last great Frost Fair in 1814, but soon they notice a green light under the ice that follows stray people and sinks them under. Not only that, but upon further investigation, they discover a giant prehistoric angler fish under the ice and heavy chains. Connecting these, the Doctor and Bill determine to find out who is keeping the fish there, and what other nefarious plans do they have.           “Thin Ice” is your basic sympathetic monster story, but as far as those go, it’s okay. There’s nothing incredibly exciting or new to it, but it’s not boring either. This epis...

          “A Blade of Grass” is a sequel of sorts to “Closer Than Sisters” as well as “The Nightcomers” in that they’re all episodes that devote the full hour to exploring an area of Vanessa’s backstory. Rather than introduce a whole new period in her past, most of what we see in this episode takes place in between a handful of moments from “Closer Than Sisters”; possibly due to that episodes’ popularity (it still may be the series’ best), but also to allow for a more intimate story being entirely set in one room with only three actors (and even then, Patti LuPone only appears a couple times). The result is a stupendous episode that ranks among the shows’ finest.           Beginning where the last episode left off, Vanessa is in a state of hypnosis recalling her time in the madhouse, where she was held the entire time in one room with the only visitor being the orderly who fed her; the man who would one day become Caliban. The goal ...