Reviews of the Bosch

Kathryn Newton may be doomed to be typecast as psychotic teens/young adults for as long as she can still pass for the age, but one can’t deny she fits the type like a glove. It’s clearly a lot of fun for her too -she is a born scenery-chewer; and the best thing that Lisa Frankenstein  does is let her lean into that. It’s a movie that feels conceptually trite on paper, and in practice isn’t always far off -but has the singular strength of being written by Diablo Cody, whose irreverent approach to dialogue and tone gives the film and Newton’s performance especially the spark of life such a pastiche needs. It’s also the feature directing debut of actress Zelda Williams, who is a good fit for the material and its arbitrarily retro aesthetics. Consciously emulating 80s teen comedies, Lisa Frankenstein  is set in 1989 where social outcast Lisa is starting at a new school with a new step-family after the trauma of her mother’s gruesome murder. Bullied or alienated by just about every...

Rustin  is exactly the kind of movie that gets nominated for one acting Oscar and nothing else. There's usually one every year: a movie that is thoroughly mediocre in every way except for one performance (usually the lead) that stands out and gets the attention of the acting branch of the Academy; sometimes they can even win (Renee Zellweger in Judy , anyone?) That's not going to happen for Colman Domingo though, but you can be sure Netflix is happy that Rustin  is in the conversation anyway. I wouldn't be reviewing it otherwise. And Rustin  is a movie that has very little going for it beyond Domingo's interesting transformation into Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin, the openly gay colleague of Martin Luther King who organized the March on Washington (and later became an icon of the American neo-conservative movement, but the movie chooses to ignore this side of his legacy). The March is the key point of focus for the movie, framed as Rustin's great ambition and ...

The diminishing returns on the films of Matthew Vaughn are very stark if you can remember a time when he was considered one of the more promising new British action filmmakers. Whether it was Kick-Ass ,  X-Men: First Class  or Kingsman: The Secret Service , or my personal favourite -his debut film Layer Cake , there was something fresh to his style and perspective. But the weaknesses of his second Kingsman movie were only exacerbated by a completely dead-on-arrival prequel , and now Argylle  has even outdone that one for soullessness.  This is a movie that seems to only exist for the digital set-pieces and a few half-baked story beats Vaughn wanted to play with. A spy flick so manufactured, perplexing, and misguided, it is less Austin Powers in Goldmember than it is the opening scene parody from Austin Powers in Goldmember . Not a good sign when a movie delays as long as possible its main plot, as this one opens on an extended sequence from a spy novel, the fourth i...

There’s something so alluring about 80s and 90s Hong Kong dramas. Hell, even some of their action movies. A certain polish and atmosphere that makes them really beautiful to just be enveloped by. Obviously, it’s true of Wong Kar-wai’s movies -which are also completely their own atmospheric entity- but I found it was also true of The Heroic Trio  and The Executioners , despite being very silly and over-the-top. Another extravagant premise is at the heart of Rouge , starring one part of that trio, Anita Mui; and again it is a movie that is organically captivating, off not only its plot but the artistry around it and the dedication of its performers. It begins in 1934 with the star-crossed lovers tale of Fleur (Mui), a server and courtesan at a tea-house and the “Twelfth Master” Chan Chen-Pang (Leslie Cheung), a young man with great expectations but ambitions towards a career in the arts. We’ve barely met them and only glimpsed their apparent tragic suicide together -in true Romeo an...

“Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.” -Hannah Arendt The soundtrack to  The Zone of Interest  is a cacophony of  commotion -gunshots, barking dogs, the occasional distant scream. It permeates the background of so much of the scenes of everyday monotony. It is hideous, uncomfortable, but after a time it becomes merely another facet  of this environment; eventually you even start to become used to it -and that is the key to why this movie is so terrifying. Jonathan Glazer works superbly in the realm of the uncomfortable -to efforts both great ( Under the Skin ) and dismal ( Birth ). But each time it is fascinating how effectively he builds an intense and deeply unsettling atmosphere out of deceptively unremarkable contexts. And the subject matter of a book by Martin Amis gave him probably the darkest opportunity for him to cultivate this, but also arguably the most important. The Zone of Interest  is a movie essentially about the banality of evil, ...

All of Us Strangers  is a lot more haunting a movie than I anticipated. And I don’t just mean in terms of how it features literal ghosts, but in how spectral and loosely attached to a corporeal plane the general atmosphere is, how affecting the pull of the past is on its protagonist, how downright unnerving it can be at times, and how it lingers with you like its own ghost after the credits roll. I thought this was just going to be a sweet gay love story with a thread running through about complicated relationships with parents. Andrew Haigh though, adapting a Japanese novel by Taichi Yamada, made something a lot more entrancingly compelling and meaningful. Something about severe trauma and loneliness, memory and the desire for closure. It is an exceptionally tender movie, centred on a morose gay television screenwriter Adam, played by Andrew Scott, who has never fully reconciled the tragic death of his parents in a car accident when he was twelve years old. Mining the memories for...

Society of the Snow  wasn’t a hard movie to make affecting. It’s subject matter is so easily empathetic. The 1972 Andes disaster, in which a plane travelling from Montevideo, Uruguay to Santiago, Chile crashed in the middle of the Andes leaving a stranded team of rugby players to survive on their own in critically dire circumstances for over two months, is one of the most compelling true-life disaster stories of the twentieth century. Sensationalized for a time given the publicized cannibalism the survivors had to resort to to stay alive, the story has nonetheless retained significant power of fascination and inspiration. Often working with some of the survivors, it has been retold in several books and one halfway forgotten Hollywood movie from 1993, but Society of the Snow  is the first adaptation made in South America, featuring a cast composed of many Uruguayan actors speaking the same language that the characters they play did. The movie is nominated for a Best Internation...