Reviews of the Bosch

Don Bluth didn’t always have a great time working with Amblin and Universal, and though collaborating with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas produced good results, he wanted independence again. By the time The Land Before Time  was in production, his whole studio Sullivan Bluth had relocated to Ireland due to various government incentives there and found funding with an independent UK studio called Goldcrest Films. His next movie would ultimately be distributed in the U.S. by United Artists. That movie would be his strangest to date (but by no means his strangest overall) -a redemption story about a dog gangster in New Orleans with the title All Dogs Go to Heaven . The title apparently came before much of the movie and it took influence from classic Hollywood moral fantasy dramas like It’s a  Wonderful Life and  A Guy Named Joe  -the latter of which in fact was remade the very year of All Dogs Go to Heaven by Bluth’s former collaborator Spielberg as Always . A uniqu...

Through scenes of humour and palpable discomfort in Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain , you find yourself waiting for the movie to reach a concentration camp on its Holocaust tour through Poland. You worry if Kieran Culkin’s erratic Benji will cause another scene, raise another salient though sensitive point of argument. But he is an emotionally open guy and takes it in as expected. It’s his cousin David (Eisenberg himself) whose innocuous reaction feels more inappropriate. I’ve never been to the site of a concentration camp, but I have been to both the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, both of which are emotionally gutting experiences. And in the moment you wonder who wouldn’t be tangibly affected by that. Evidently, it’s David. A Real Pain  is about two formerly very close cousins on widely different wavelengths in terms of their connections to their pain, both in a general sense of their lives and the world, and in a particular sense of inherited tr...

There is something curiously hopeful about Red One . It is the kind of movie that can only come at the end of an era, when studios have saturated the market so emphatically with a particular breed of malformed populist mush that there’s virtually nowhere left to go with it. Red One  is an abysmal movie, vividly awful on just about every level. But some solace may be taken in what it represents for this current, largely vacant age in Hollywood. It’s embarrassing they let it get to this point. It’s not the first time I’ve said this , and may not be the last, but Red One  is the kind of bad movie you’d expect to show up in the background of a different better movie as a satire of Hollywood cynicism and shallowness -at least two of the major actors in this movie have been in other movies that use this device. It is what happens when a studio tries to graft the formulas and conventions of a superhero franchise product onto the trappings of traditional Christmas mythology. And the r...

The first musical number of Emilia P é rez hits like a tonal tsunami. Up to that point, which is really just a few minutes in, the movie bears the (somewhat problematic) aesthetics and hallmarks of a gritty Mexican drama, possibly revolving around a corrupt legal system. When Zoe Saldaña and all the meandering townspeople around her break into bombastic song and dance, the movie sets clear its wholly different stylistic intentions. A combining of the dramatic realism of a crime movie with the hyper stylization of an operatic musical. Director Jacques Audiard initially wrote the story as a libretto, before adapting it to a movie. And for retaining all of the requisite grand emotions, melodrama and action, not to mention the somewhat epic scope and context, Emilia P é rez is one of the most authentically opera-like movies I’ve ever seen. It also happens to be a movie that wears its audacity on its sleeve, sometimes to a fault -with a most unique and intriguing premise. Based loosely on a...

As a kid, I wasn’t so affected by the typical ‘traumatic’ death scenes of animated children’s movies. Mufasa’s death in The Lion King really did nothing for me. Same with Bambi’s mom even -it took until I was older to really appreciate the raw tragedy of that. But the one that did get me, much less popular than those, was the death of Littlefoot’s mother in The Land Before Time , and I still think it is perhaps the most effective death scene of this kind in a movie for kids. Both Simba and Bambi lose their parents entirely all of a sudden, but Littlefoot has to be there as his mother is dying, to take in her final sentiments to him, and it is heartbreaking, especially with the emotionally potent detail in the animation -the gloominess, the perfectly sad features. It honestly still gets me a little bit. I’m just old enough to be part of the generation where the Don Bluth movie most significant to my childhood was The Land Before Time .  My family owned the movie on VHS, and some of...

There is a strain of self-satisfied intellectualism to Heretic , a movie that is quite brazenly about interrogating faith and the foundations of religious beliefs more broadly. It can feel a touch pompous at times in its offensive, regardless of the validity underlining its text; and certainly a few of the lectures read like those dirtbag internet atheist screeds designed purely to get a rise out of the devout. Directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods approach the film’s subject matter as a mostly honest theological debate though, lending credence to an alternative viewpoint and criticising the fallacies in some of these arguments that take down religion. And in this case it is the smart decision not to come down firmly on either side. Beck and Woods have claimed that the horror of this film is rooted in its ideas more than conventional horror tropes and techniques. I think the horror in this movie is effective, but that they are quite wrong in this assessment. Heretic doesn’t draw horror ...

Steve McQueen is known for his radical movies, and whether you like it or not, Blitz  is his least radical. More in its substance than its style incidentally, which is still captivating at a number of junctures; but the story of a separated boy and his mother trying to find one another during the London Blitz, seems a rather passée topic for the man behind Shame , 12 Years a Slave , and Small Axe . Yet I can also see why he wanted to tell this story, certain corners of it especially. And the Blitz is a particular trauma of British war history that hasn’t been reckoned with a lot cinematically. We’ve seen more than a few stories about children sent to the countryside to avoid the Blitz, but what about those who were caught in the midst of it? For McQueen, Blitz  is his World War II movie, concentrated on the home front and what life was like for working class and marginalized Britons living through it. It’s the story of George (Elliot Heffernan), a biracial kid living in S...