Reviews of the Bosch

The starting point for Ryuichi Hiroki’s Ride or Die  seems to have been simply the thought that what if the queer undercurrents and subtext of Thelma & Louise was made overt text? Or alternatively, what if  Bound had continued its’ story as a fugitive romance after the final scene of Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon driving off together? Ride or Die  seems to combine these story prompts into a pretty obvious premise, but with a dash of the twee sentimentality of a Japanese Y/A romance. It is based on a manga, and that very much comes across in the tone and the writing. However, Hiroki keeps the film from being constrained by the tenets of its adaptation, and for its’ bouts of melodramatic dialogue and overbearing romanticizing, it does manage to be an effective and even mature film. It begins with Rei Nagasawa (Kiko Mizuhara) meeting a man at a club, seducing him, going back to his place, and then murdering him as they’re having sex with a knife and broken glass. After...

          Shiva Baby  is about an aimless young bisexual Jewish woman attending a shiva with her parents where she happens to run into both her ex-girlfriend and the wife of the man she’s currently sleeping with. And it is the most discomforting movie I’ve seen since maybe Uncut Gems . The film is the debut of Emma Seligman, adapted from her own student short, and she rather cleverly messes around with the inherently comic connotations of her premise. While on paper it reads like a recipe for hijinks, a romantic-comedy farce even, Seligman follows her narrative into logical corners, lingers on the awkward situations and confrontations, builds tension in her smattering of storied relationships, and more often than not actually skews horror in tone. Which makes sense, as that’s exactly how Danielle (Rachel Sennott) is experiencing the proceedings.      This film is artfully structured and gets a lot out of what is clearly a limited budget....

“You know, I’ve met hundreds of people out here and I don’t ever say a final goodbye. I always just say, ‘I’ll see you down the road.’ And I do. And whether it’s a month, or a year, or sometimes years, I see them again.” That speech by real-life nomad Bob Wells comes at the end of the third act of Nomadland ; after we’ve seen Frances McDormands’ Fern spend a year travelling around the western and mid-western United States looking for temporary work and communing with nature after the death of her husband and the closure of a gypsum plant forced her out of her home in Empire, Nevada. It’s a moving sentiment, intrinsically specific in its’ folksy connotations, quoted both in the films’ trailer and by director Chloé Zhao on winning the Golden Globe Award in that category last month -to the point it might feel wearily aphoristic by now. However I was glad to see upon finally watching the movie, only just now released in Canada, that the meaning in that line baked into the context ...

The Father  is the third film I’ve seen in as many months to be at least on some level about living with dementia. And for certain, it is the best. Directed by Florian Zeller in his film debut, and based off his own French play Le Pere , it is set almost entirely within a single flat in London, a claustrophobic environment in which you’re asked to stew in the diminishing mind of eighty-three year old Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) as he begins to suspect conspiracy at the hands of his family and caretakers. Largely subjective, the film is intense and disorienting; faces change, possessions or people disappear, and it is never clear how much is genuine manipulation or elder abuse and how much is just the effects of his crippling ailment. Anthony is introduced in a bit of a familiar context, having frightened away his live-in caretaker over suspecting her of stealing his watch, and his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) confirming its’ whereabouts in a routine hiding spot of his. It’s a very...

One of the major emerging filmmakers of Hong Kong’s 80’s New Wave alongside the likes of Wong Kar-Wai and John Woo was the comparatively less-renowned (at least to world cinema) Ann Hui. For forty years now she’s had an interesting career that has spanned all kinds of genres from documentary to romance to thriller to martial arts film and is known for being an intensely socially conscious filmmaker. Early in her career she made an unofficial trilogy dealing with the effects and aftermath of the Vietnam War on the Vietnamese people, the last of which was 1982’s Boat People . It would appear the film doesn’t have much to do with Hong Kong, although most of the major actors are from Hong Kong, which is a touch problematic for such a Vietnamese story. It’s actually about a Japanese photojournalist Akutagawa, played by George Lam, documenting the situation in and around Da Nang in the wake of the end of the war. In his experiences with both jaded military officials and the desperate poor se...

Sometimes it’s enough to watch a giant ape punch a giant lizard. I’ve been lukewarm on Warner Brothers’ and Legendary Pictures’ “MonsterVerse” cinematic universe. Though each of the movies its’ produced have been generally fun and featured scenes and elements that I’ve liked, none of them have been anything great, certainly not next to the best iterations of the Godzilla  and King Kong  IPs. And most of what has held those other movies back is also present in Godzilla vs. Kong , the big crossover that they’ve been building to since at least Kong: Skull Island  in 2017: poor writing, dull human characters, dull human storylines between the action that sometimes feels scant. It’s a pattern that persists even with routine changes in directors and casts. This time though I wasn’t bothered so much by that. Could it be I’ve lost my cynicism and just accepted the flaws in conjunction with the stuff that actually works, or could it be the movie is genuinely better? Maybe it’s a b...

It should perhaps not come as such a surprise that Bob Odenkirk is actually pretty good as the lead of an action movie. It’s been a long time since his surrealist comedy days on Mr. Show , his work with Tim and Eric  and Tenacious D . Shows like Breaking Bad  and Better Call Saul , movies like Nebraska , The Post , and Little Women  prove he has a lot more versatility than you’d expect from the guy who created Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker for Saturday Night Live . There have also been plenty of action stars before him that have come from comedy. And yet this latest attempt at rewiring his image seemed like a step too far. Shabby, midwestern, fifty-eight year old Odenkirk just cannot be an action star. Nobody  however, makes him work. The blandly titled film from John Wick  writer Derek Kolstad and director Ilya Naishuller casts him in the role of a dishevelled suburbanite whose long-suppressed rage and hidden skills bubble to the surface after a humiliating ...