Reviews of the Bosch

Isabel Sandoval was not out as a trans woman when she wrote, directed, and starred in Se ñ orita , her directorial debut, in 2011. But it played a big part in helping her realize she was trans. It’s a small Filipino drama film with shades of noir about a trans sex worker from Manila trying to carve out a new life for herself in the small town of Talisay by raising the son of an old friend now in Dubai (heavily implied to be her own), while aiding in the grassroots mayoral campaign of an enthusiastic, progressive politician who is ethical to a fault. There are complications hanging over from her old life, but she is determined to leave it behind. The film opens with Sandoval’s Donna already straddling these two worlds, going home with a young guy in the city one night, then making campaign posters in a rural setting the next morning. But one of the most interesting things you notice about the movie is the fact that Donna’s trans-ness is almost secondary to the plot. There’s one scene ea...

A Quiet Place  is not a movie that needed a denser mythology. The 2018 horror film from John Krasinski had a clever and a simple enough premise that really didn’t require any further elaboration. And the movie ended on that strong note of hope that’s a good catharsis for an apocalyptic story. The origin of those highly sound-sensitive monsters and what’s become of other people were curios, but not much more -and the job of the sequel seems to be clearly to make them such. It certainly can’t rely on premise originality anymore or the mystique of the creatures, not defined in their full proportions until the end of that first movie. It needs some other source of creative momentum. I’m not sure that A Quiet Place Part II ever finds that, but it does make do alright as it provides more context and charts a narrative direction that will presumably spill over into the rest of this now apparent trilogy. It comes at the cost of that first films’ more appealing minimalism: the long stretche...

“Poison them, drown them, bash them on the head!” This is a line from the 1961 Disney animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians , shouted over the phone by one Cruella De Vil. The villainous fashion designer is of course referring to what should be done to the ninety-nine dalmatian puppies her hired goons have kidnapped for her so she can skin them and turn them into a coat. This is also the character the Walt Disney Company in their infinite wisdom has most recently decided to rehabilitate. Because everyone secretly wants to sympathize with a serial dog killer. Don’t get me wrong, Cruella is one hell of a great villain -and probably among Disney’s best -both for her iconic look and personality and for her terrifying pursuit of mass animal cruelty. She is not however a good choice for a sympathetic origin story -she’s just a little too genuinely evil. On some level Disney knows this, which is why their new interpretation of Cruella, played admittedly rather well by Emma Stone, bears...

Francis Ford Coppola insists The Conversation  wasn’t inspired by Watergate. The script had been around since the mid-1960s and filming concluded before the tapes broke publicly. Nonetheless, by April 1974 they were still all anyone was talking about, America was in the midst of its’ first major impeachment process in over a century, and here came a movie by one of Hollywood’s hottest young filmmakers about uncovering secrets through surveillance. Whether or not it had anything to do with the biggest political scandal of the twentieth century was ultimately irrelevant. It struck a chord at that time that it never could have had it come any earlier or later. This may be what gave it a boost in reception and acclaim, including the Palme d’Or win at Cannes and a handful of Oscar nominations that it might have won had it not been for Coppola’s other film of 1974, The Godfather Part II . The parallels run deeper than subject matter too. According to Coppola, the very equipment portrayed...

“All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful.” Jiro Horikoshi Great artists and artisans don’t always have control over what their art is used for. Did William Barton, who designed the Eye of Providence on the American one dollar bank note, have any idea it would become a symbol of unhinged conspiracies for decades? It’s certain Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson didn’t approve of the popular bootleg image of Calvin peeing that began circulating as he was drawing the strip. The guy who first made that Guy Fawkes mask would likely have been taken aback by how it became a cultural symbol of anarchy and revolution. And Jiro Horikoshi absolutely hated the war in which his Mitsubishi fighter craft were employed for aerial combat. The truth is that once a work of art is out in the world on some level it no longer belongs to the artist -it can be taken and twisted by whoever finds new meaning or value or purpose in it. There’s nothing the artist can do but hope that the art stan...

Even after seeing it, I’m not entirely sure what the impetus for the plot of Those Who Wish Me Dead actually is. As far as I can gather the super important information being carried by Owen (Jake Weber) and thereafter his son Connor (Finn Little) across some six states is evidence of a major money laundering operation by a mob boss played by Tyler Perry of all people. There’s not much specificity to what it really is and just how damning, only that they need to make it public (and adamantly not through the police) before they are dispatched by a pair of hitmen. But this vagueness isn’t a weakness for Taylor Sheridan’s new film, as its’ much more about the sheer brutality of this manhunt against the brutality of nature than the details of its plot. Taylor Sheridan is an interesting filmmaker. Having written the acclaimed screenplays for Sicario  and Hell or High Water , directed Wind River , and created the series Yellowstone , he  has carved a niche for himself as about t...

Zack Snyder is not a filmmaker I have any interest in. I skipped his extended cut of  Justice League  earlier this year because I couldn’t care less for it in light of what was destined to be excruciating discourse. I also didn’t think it had any chance of changing my opinion on the movie -from everything I’ve heard, I was probably right. But even apart from the hideously toxic cult of personality that Snyder has either knowingly or accidentally cultivated for himself among the worst kind of genre fans on the planet, he’s just not a terribly compelling director. His stylized aesthetics on movies like 300 and Watchmen  are visually distinct but substantively hollow, and while he’s certainly a competent filmmaker, beyond what his movies say about his values and his politics, there’s nothing I could deem all that worthwhile to them. Army of the Dead  however, piques my curiosity. For one thing it’s a zombie film, and Snyder’s last excursion in this genre, his 2004 remak...