Reviews of the Bosch

There is a gender wedge key to the principal conflict of  The Roses that goes mostly unstated. The destruction of one career simultaneous to the eruption of another may be what caused the spark, but the notion of the woman in the marriage being the breadwinner for the man is what lit the fuse. As much as emotions and repressed resentments come into focus, personal priorities, actions, and manipulations inform the enmity, this disruption of the presupposed status quo is what really cannot be forgiven. The Roses  is the second major adaptation of Warren Adler’s 1981 novel The War of the Roses , after the 1989 film of the same name directed by Danny DeVito -though like that movie this one changes the given names of its protagonists. More than that, it rearranges the premise substantially, moving the action geographically and just about all of the causes in the rift between its couple -in the hands of director Jay Roach resembling more the aesthetics of a conventional American com...

Caught Stealing  might be the most strictly conventional movie Darren Aronofsky has ever made -and that is not a criticism. With his movies so often steeped in complexities and metaphors and experimentation -and usually around dense or heavy subject matter, it’s a little refreshing to see him cut loose of that for a change and honestly try his hand at making a crowd-pleaser, or what could at least modestly pass for one from him. It is certainly not a joy ride a lot of the time, but it is a legitimate ride -an original crime thriller with effective tension and twists that Aronofsky can still bring some style and character to. And a movie like this honestly feels quite welcome at the end of a dry August. Adapted by Charlie Huston from his own novel, the film stars Austin Butler as Hank, a bartender in late 90s Manhattan, originally from California, and persistently haunted by the drunken car accident that killed his friend and ended a promising baseball career. While his British neig...

As a relatively rare non-British person who was familiar with Richard Osman as a comedian and television presenter before he became an internationally bestselling author there’s something kind of quaint about seeing an adaptation of his first novel The Thursday Murder Club , starring a collection of British acting legends and helmed by Chris Columbus, a director with a fair amount of pedigree. Just because my own reference point for Osman, as someone who hasn’t read the books, is as the tall lanky guy with some good dry wit who shows up occasionally on QI and Would I Lie to You?   There’s a similar quaintness to the movie itself though, which skirts the edges a little of that light comedy subgenre coined by Isabel Custodio, “ Book Club  Cinema” , centred on elderly characters played by revered stars engaged in low-stakes shenanigans within a setting and atmosphere of vaguely upper-class retired comfort. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel  is perhaps Britain’s best example of ...

Van Gogh is alluded to on a couple occasions in the movie Basquiat  by Julian Schnabel -twenty-two years before Schnabel would put his stamp on the story of the most famous tortured artist with At Eternity’s Gate . From the start of his career as a filmmaker, he seemed to be building towards it -his predilection towards the lives of unconventional artists in turmoil beginning here in 1996. He himself of course was and is a successful painter -he had a lens into that subject that other filmmakers might lack. And  Basquiat is set within a world he occupied -the art scene of late 80s New York, coloured by a postmodernist explosion, by Andy Warhol and his acolytes. But Jean-Michel Basquiat was more than that as Schnabel endeavours to show, and does a fine job emphasizing his distinctness even against a litany of tortured poets. Basquiat is played by Jeffrey Wright in his first leading role on film -a sensitive portrait of an eccentric man, a drug-addled high school dropout living ...

For its upbeat tempo and optimistic spirit, “Pennies from Heaven” is subtly a fairly depressing song. Though the lyrics are intrinsically hopeful, the circumstances implied of the singer’s fantasy suggests a real sense of misery. It is in a way the perfect song of the Great Depression, and I’ve seen it multiple times underscoring that era and a diminishing of fortunes more broadly within it. The ultimate desperate fantasy of the financially insecure: that every time it rains there will be pennies from heaven -mere pennies. It is a beautiful song, but achingly bittersweet. And its spirit is captured well in the 1981 movie of the same name -that feels a touch like something from the 1930s, but would have been positively cruel had it actually come in that era. Pennies from Heaven  was written by Dennis Potter, a legend of British television drama, adapting his own highly successful and beloved serial of the same name for the BBC (the breakout project for Bob Hoskins incidentally). For...

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...