Reviews of the Bosch

For a director known for drawing on a lot of his own reference points for movies, whether it be experiences, interactions, or thought processes, Richard Linklater has not made a film more personal than Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood . He grew up in Houston during the heyday of the Apollo program in the 1960s, a stone’s throw from NASA, and though he personally didn’t have any connection to that industry, he knew plenty of kids whose parents did. Essentially, it was the front lines of the space race, and it makes sense such an environment would fuel so much imagination. Everybody knew a kid growing up who wanted to be an astronaut after all. Imagine if real astronauts were just down the road. So Linklater decided to elaborate on that fantasy while also sharing in detail the intricacies of life for a kid in that place and time. And to do this he chose animation as the best desired format, his first foray into the medium since 2006’s A Scanner Darkly . Like that film and his earlier W...

I feel like I’ve seen this on stage before. That was my thought through a lot of The Outfit , a small-scale gangster movie by Graham Moore, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Imitation Game , here making his directing debut. I was wrong, I was probably thinking of Jez Butterworth’s Mojo  or some one-act I caught on a school theatre trip years ago –but this movie had such a similar feel,  mostly  in a good way. Contained to a single location and a small cast of characters, it’s a different, curious take on the gangster movie that feels like a lively piece of theatre transposed onto the big screen. In plot it certainly follows some familiar tropes of the genre, the whole thing revolving around the identity of a ‘rat’, but these are matched with other more distinct flavours. Most notably, this is that rare mob movie told from the perspective of someone outside of but still inextricably linked to that world: Leonard Burling (Mark Rylance), an old English tailor (or cutter)...

It’s really cool that Criterion is becoming a place attractive to a certain kind of modern world cinema that might not so readily find itself in the collection but is worth shedding a light on anyways. It’s also cool to see Criterion actively pursuing this kind of relationship. Ryusuke Hamaguchi doesn’t have a single film in Criterion’s ranks (though Drive My Car  is on its’ way there), but that didn’t stop them from becoming the streaming home for his earlier Happy Hour . And now France , a film from last year by Bruno Dumont, has its’ streaming premiere on the platform. Sure it’s not something like an exclusive Marvel TV show on Disney+ to attract new subscribers, yet there may well be a contingent of Léa Seydoux fans willing to join up for a chance to watch one of her most acclaimed films in recent years. I actually did hear enough buzz about this one to get me interested. I’ve been a fan of Seydoux for a little while and last year was a very good year for her, even just between...

It seems that Hollywood lately has been  really interested in resuscitating the action-adventure movie -specifically that classic   model of exotic archaeological treasure hunt that is the most pervasive in pop culture. I think it started with the unexpected success of that Jumanji  reboot , because those that have followed in its’ footsteps have been generally geared towards a similar winking comic sensibility. There was of course last years’ neutralized  Jungle Cruise from Disney and this years’ disaster Uncharted  from Sony, but I think it’s Paramount’s newest offering, the blandly titled  The Lost City , that comes closest to a sense of fun and originality matching that 2017 video game satire, even if it too isn’t nearly as smart or necessarily unconventional as it could be. One advantage it may have is that The Lost City  has a slightly older target audience than those other titles I referenced. Its’ directed and co-written by a pair of young fil...

Sex and horror have always been comfortable bedfellows. Many of the genre’s most enduring tropes and devices have their origins in sexual politics, psycho-sexual themes. We’re perhaps most aware of it in the make-up of the slasher movie, which conventionally casts sexuality in a morally corrupt light -the sexually active characters are always the ones to die while the virginal girl is the one to survive. X , a film by Ti West, turns this notion on its head, while also examining the aesthetics of sex and desirability in the horror genre and beyond. All as it gleefully slashes its way through several pornography professionals on a farm in the middle of nowhere. The movie is a very dedicated throwback, set in 1979, and with both the look and a heavy dosage of the plot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre . Like that film, it opens in the aftermath of the carnage, is set around a creepy farmhouse in rural Texas, and though plenty gory is far more interested in being grotesque. This film too make...

Dances With Wolves  is not really the movie I was expecting. By which I mean it’s a good deal better than its’ reputation, which isn’t so much that it’s bad as much as it is hollow -a well-meaning but empty act of reparation for Native American representation in film. It seems to be held up often as the quintessential “white saviour” movie, and yet I was shocked to find it only barely meets that definition. While it is certainly a white person’s story (he’s literally the title character) and every aspect of Lakota culture is illustrated through that lens, it is not the narrative of a white guy becoming leader of a non-white collective fighting his own on their behalf and ushering them into new prosperity as I was led to believe by its’ comparisons to movies that do do that. Indeed, Kevin Costner’s John Dunbar is a rather passive and observational character for significant stretches of his time among these people. Lawrence of Arabia , a movie less criticized for this, is way more of...

Wow… That was a shitshow! In some ways expected, some unexpected. Going into this years’ Oscars show, producer Will Packer stated his primary objective was that his Oscars be entertaining. I don’t know if that’s entirely what happened, but certainly it is going to be memorable -mostly due to one man who very quickly overshadowed the rest of the ceremony. Weird shit happens at the Oscars, it’s almost guaranteed, and yet that hasn’t effected the ratings it seems these last several years. And of course it’s because of ABC and the Academy’s obsession with ratings that resulted in a lot of the very worst material of this Oscars show. Like every year, there were scattered wonderful moments, there were a few nice, moving speeches, but they didn’t come close to making up for what came between them. Even the awards themselves were without any major upsets, with the possible exception of Kenneth Branagh taking home Best Original Screenplay for Belfast . And so there was nothing to distract from ...