Reviews of the Bosch

Roger Ebert’s famous line about movies being “a machine that generates empathy” was on my mind quite heavily after seeing Falling , the family drama directing debut of Viggo Mortensen. Because Falling  is a movie that asks you to empathize with a really monstrous person. And it doesn’t use the usual tools to do so, such as revealing a traumatic past or an emotional crisis or a secret act of human decency. The film is split between the past and present, and even in the former we see that this guy was always kind of an asshole. The film asks you to empathize with him almost just for his humanity -because it would make you the decent person. I don’t know that I do in the end, but this film challenged me to try, without resorting to any of the usual bullshit about being a good person deep down -and that is something I very much respect, especially coming from a man whose last movie was Green Book ! And it’s true there is some of that Green Book  naivete at play here; you get the s...

In 2018, Sam Levinson, the son of Oscar-winning director of Rain Man  and Good Morning Vietnam  Barry Levinson, made a movie called Assassination Nation , about a town devolving into anarchy due to a hacking scandal. It received mixed reviews -praise directed at things such as its style and themes, but criticism where it concerned the writing and characters. That criticism it seems, really hit Levinson hard, as have the minor areas of backlash to his otherwise well-received HBO series Euphoria . And Malcolm & Marie , which he wrote and directed entirely in quarantine, is a rather transparent expression of his ego as it pertains to both his artistry and the critical response to it. Shot in black and white, the film depicts a single evening at the home of a filmmaker Malcolm (John David Washington) and his girlfriend Marie (Zendaya) following his first major movie premiere. Celebration turns into interrogation and argument mostly relating to the movie, how it’s perceived, an...

It’s kinda weird that John Lee Hancocks’ best movie is still Saving Mr. Banks  -that surprisingly sweet film  about the development of Mary Poppins  that actually turned out to be more than the vapid Disney ego-fest it looked like it was going to be. His The Founder , about the building of Ray Krocs’ McDonalds empire was also better and more interesting than it initially appeared. And so I had some cautious optimism when I heard about The Little Things , his latest movie, a crime film that he had written back in the 90s but never got around to actually making until now (by which I mean 2019). Sure it looked like just another mundane serial killer flick, but perhaps there was something unique to Hancocks’ take on it. It can’t possibly be merely his attempt to rip off Seven  or something… Alas, The Little Things  is a movie that has no staying power, and even less of a discernible identity of its own. It’s unambitious, extremely beholden to the truisms of the seri...

One of the only animated movies you’ll find on the Criterion Channel (though also Watership Down  and The Last Unicorn  –which is cool!) is Kirikou and the Sorceress , the acclaimed 1998 French film from Michel Ocelot drawn extensively from the folklore and mythologies of West Africa. It may well have been the first animated film to feature an entirely black cast, both in the figures animated and their voice actors, all of whom were African-French or Senegalese. There’s an overwhelming African richness to the aesthetic as well, the architecture and depth of field and colour schemes. For a movie made by a lot of white guys, it comes across as exceptionally authentic and non-patronizing –to the point of being censored from release for a time in the U.S. and U.K. Perhaps the most famous thing about Kirikou  is that fact and the prolific nudity that accounted for it. Most of the characters in the film spend the duration of it at least partially naked in the entirely casual, n...

The Dig  is that kind of movie that is very interesting, though not very enjoyable. A well-performed yet often dry British period drama about the discovery of an age-old Anglo-Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk in 1939, there’s a lot of fascinating material the film touches on in terms of archaeology and history, but it struggles to retain investment as it pairs these elements with largely uninspired character drama and tedious plotting. The film is the second from director Simon Stone, after his acclaimed Australian drama The Daughter  in 2015. Like that film, The Dig  has a remarkable cast that reliably distracts from the mediocre direction, but they’re not enough to carry the film over its’ own tenuous mounds. Right off, we’re introduced to Ralph Fiennes as Basil Brown, amateur archaeologist hired to excavate the burial mounds at the Sutton Hoo estate of Edith Pretty, played with considerable restraint especially given her last performance , by Carey Mulligan. Cl...

There’s a point in The White Tiger , where Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav), after a major and dramatic wake-up call in his career as a driver for a wealthy family, laments on the state of being poor in India. In voice-over narration he comments, “I was trapped in the rooster coop, and don’t believe for a second there’s a million-rupee game show you can win to get out of it.” This isn’t the only time the movie dispels the somewhat romanticized portrait of Indian wealth inequity exported by the likes of Slumdog Millionaire , but it is the most direct. For Balram, who knows the rigidity of the caste system very well, below a certain wealth threshold it is a torturous life with few prospects; and he will do whatever it takes to keep from sinking back into it. The White Tiger  is based on the novel by Arvind Adiga, a dark satire on the Indian caste system in the twenty-first century, a story that starts out like Great Expectations , but ultimately turns into The Godfather  by way of ...

Al Pacino and Robert De Niro had been friends for decades, but they had never shared the screen together until  Heat . Yeah, they were both in The Godfather Part II , where De Niro won his first Oscar, but as characters separated by several decades they never crossed paths. It took fifteen years after the end of the decade they both dominated for them to actually meet on screen for a gritty Michael Mann crime drama about an extremely clever career criminal and the obsessed LAPD officer determined to take him down. Heat  is one of those movies that has an incredibly high reputation in certain film circles that I’ve known about for years. For some it is the main or only reason to know of and revere Michael Mann as a filmmaker -it’s the movie that most often comes up whenever he’s referenced, thus pigeonholing him to some degree in spite of his more versatile work on films like The Last of the Mohicans  or Ali . Heat  is known for being rough and brutal and “realistic” ...