Reviews of the Bosch

Shadow in the Clouds is a film wearing a lot of hats. It is an action movie and a horror movie and a creature feature and a revenge flick and a war film and a feminist drama and so many other things rolled into one. To say it is ambitious is an understatement, it is determined to carve out its own unique niche in the realm of weird genre cinema, an ideal film for TIFF’s Midnight Madness label where it premiered this past week. It is the first international feature from New Zealand director Roseanne Liang, from a script that was (we should be upfront about) originally written by the disgraced Max Landis -though heavily rewritten by Liang herself much to the movies’ benefit as well as its’ P.R. (Landis has always been a terrible writer).  She definitely has a love for the material though, and the message, pulling it out of its’ gimmicky roots. She may even be following in the footsteps of another Kiwi filmmaker once taken with a gonzo taste in horror -a Bad Taste , even. And yet for ...

There may be no single movie studio I have championed more than the small Kilkenny, Ireland-based animation hub Cartoon Saloon (still an awful name). Since their debut feature The Secret of Kells  in 2009, they’ve become one of the last great beacons of traditional animation in the western world, and one of the most uniquely compelling in their artistry. Initially supplementing their income through illustration, advertising work, and a few childrens’ T.V. series, they’ve since produced Song of the Sea  (one of my favourite films of the last decade ) in 2014, and The Breadwinner  in 2017, as well as a number of shorts. All three of their features (and one short, the beautiful Late Afternoon ) have been critical darlings and nominated for Oscars. They have a flawless track record, and one that continues with their latest film, Wolfwalkers , so far the best movie of 2020. It is the third and final installment in an unofficial trilogy spearheaded by studio co-founder Tomm Moo...

I was both excited and nervous to see Miss Saigon . Excited because it is a musical by Claude-Michael Sch ö nberg and Alain Boublil, the team that created Les Mis ; nervous because they are white men writing about Vietnamese characters, their relationship to America, and the Vietnam War. I was right to be both. Miss Saigon  is therefore a complicated musical for me that I find I like and dislike in about equal measure. A transplant of the Puccini opera Madame Butterfly , already a pretty problematic source, from imperial Japan to wartime Vietnam, it is the love story of a poor Vietnamese prostitute and an American G.I., and her attempts to reunite with him in the years following his discharge. It premiered in 1989, so naturally the version I watched was the recorded 25 th  anniversary show in 2014 at the Prince Edward Theatre in the West End, and we’ll talk about the problems with that later. Firstly, the shows’ plot is rather typical and rather typically melancholy for storie...

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account)  is the most important book Charles Dickens ever wrote. It is not the most famous or influential by any means (that would of course be A Christmas Carol ), but it is the book that is the purest expression of the authors’ style, identity, and worldview. It is his most personal work, semi-autobiographical in its story of the chronology from infancy to adulthood of a character who overcomes great loss and hardships to find a fulfilling life as a writer. To read David Copperfield  is to understand Dickens himself. Armando Iannucci knew this when he decided to make a new adaptation of the novel for a twenty-first century audience. He also knew that Dickens adaptations are ubiquitous at this point. Films are a bit rarer, but every few years a new television adaptation rears its head to keep the authors’ unique world an...

  “I’m thinking of ending things.” This eponymous line comes up a lot in Charlie Kaufmans’ adaptation of the novel by Iain Reid. The inner monologue of Jessie Buckley’s character, referred to by a number of names (often a variation on ‘Lucy’) none of which seem true, keeps coming back to it as she debates the pros and cons of her seven-week relationship with Jesse Plemons’ Jake. She’s meeting his parents for the first time, out on a remote farm in the middle of winter. Their relationship is full of awkward body language and stale conversation, intimations of a personal connection but nothing substantive. It’s a long drive and a long evening after that -she has plenty of occasions to broach the subject both mentally and vocally, but she can never quite follow through. She really can’t end things. This movie is only Kaufmans’ third time in the directors’ chair, but he has built up over two decades a distinct cinematic voice through the movies he’s written, most notably Adaptation ...

Round two with Andrew Lloyd-Webber!  Jesus Christ Superstar  was only his third musical and the appropriate thematic follow-up to his second,  Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat . A relatively minor figure from the Old Testament is one thing though, Jesus Christ himself is a hell of an ambitious subject for such an inexperienced artist. Like that earlier Biblical show, it was co-written with Tim Rice and initially conceived and released as a rock opera, only to be adapted into musical form in fairly short order just a year later, premiering on Broadway in 1971. As its’ title might suggest, it’s not the purely faithful adaptation of the Gospel story your Christian grandmother might prefer. The sung-through musical depicts the last week of Jesus’ life accurately enough, though with a fondness for deliberate anachronisms in aesthetic and lyrics that directly equates him and his followers with the youth counterculture movement of the era. Certainly Norman ...

About time I watched another classic of world cinema! In fact, Alain Resnais’ feature directing debut Hiroshima Mon Amour  is considered one of the first landmark films of the French New Wave. Written by acclaimed French novelist and playwright Marguerite Duras, it is a lovely movie set in the ruins of a great tragedy over a period of about thirty-six hours. Emmanuelle Riva is a French actress shooting a film in Hiroshima. Eiji Okada is a Japanese architect whom she met and is having an affair with. As her time in the country is coming to an end, the two contrive to spend more time together as they converse around the city, share memories, and interrogate their feelings. I can see a lot of other movies in Hiroshima Mon Amour , most notably Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise  -likewise a conversational film about a short affair in a foreign city; but also In the Mood for Love , Lost in Translation , even Wings of Desire . Whether in the concept, the style, the ambiguity ...