Reviews of the Bosch

Honestly, I respect that Wake Up Dead Man  is a deeply atheist movie about the Catholic Church that nonetheless argues for the worth of its virtues when earnestly espoused. And I think that one needs to be a certain brand of lapsed Catholic (or just lapsed Christian) atheist in order to do that. To understand and depict the corrupt and exploitative power of the church, the kind of righteous piety it can give rise to and even encourage, preying specifically on the desperate and vulnerable; but also to understand what spiritually healing power faith itself can have when taken on its own and siphoned through a genuine desire to do good by a community. Rian Johnson appears to be at this crossroads in, of all things, his third Benoit Blanc murder mystery. But if there’s one thing these movies are great at, it is addressing serious and relevant themes through a whodunit framework, whether it be the entitlement and casual racism of insular elites or the insecure egotism of tech olig...

What if, instead of dying at the end of Hamlet , the titular Prince of Denmark had instead continued his mission of vengeance on his uncle into the afterlife? And what if instead of being an indecisive prince, Hamlet was a headstrong determined warrior princess? This perhaps was what Mamoru Hosoda was thinking whenever he encountered the play in his youth, and has now made his AU fanfic into a grand and ambitious feature film. It is ultimately a good film but it doesn’t shake that sensibility. Mamoru Hosoda has lately taken to putting his stamp on classical stories -his previous movie Belle  was a cyberspace retelling of Beauty and the Beast  to mixed effects. And he takes a similar approach on Scarlet , his latest film, by casting approximations of figures from Shakespeare’s great tragedy into an action-oriented underworld where the pursuit of revenge can be carried out dramatically even post-death. Of course, revenge was never Hamlet’s prime character flaw -somethi...

The character at the centre of Edward Berger’s Ballad of a Small Player  feels quite weak and artificial as we are introduced to him. A character that really doesn’t suit Colin Farrell, who seems to struggle with both the aristocratic affect and the accent itself that feels like a two-bit imitation of Ralph Fiennes. It was not coming together. And then, roughly twenty minutes in, the Irish comes out, the facade is dropped and the movie starts looking up, until you have to reckon with what it is actually doing. Ballad of a Small Player is a step down in thematic scale for Berger, being a more intimate story than either his previous English films All Quiet on the Western Front  and Conclave , and yet it is set against a world more grandiose and opulent than either of those could aspire towards. Shot on location in Macau, it spends a lot of time in its stylish casinos, luxurious penthouses and elegant restaurants, creating an intense image of wealth and excess, delectable until i...

I’m not a fan of the way Hulu chose to release this season  of   Futurama  all at once. The binge model isn’t really what it once was –Netflix is pretty much the only company still dependent on it. Shows don’t last so long in public consciousness under the model, especially if they are not promoted to begin with. And at this stage releasing the tenth season of Futurama  in this format bodes ill for the series’ sustained future. This season is the first of a two-season renewal the show got last year, but if this release structure is any indication, I don’t think the series will be picked up for more episodes after 2026. Such is the eternal pattern of Futurama and after this latest season premiere I can’t help wonder if that is for the best –as it is certainly one of the better candidates one could point to of the show losing steam. Blatantly not a good choice to kick off the season with. Bender has had several arbitrary identity crises over the years, whether around h...

“No one ever loved me that much.” Humphrey Bogart says this line in Casablanca at the height of his character’s cynicism -after his lost love has shown up again with another man, after a painful truth of their liaison has been revealed to him, and as the world itself appears to be closing in. He says it to a young Bulgarian woman desperate for his help in escaping the Nazi-occupied territory with her new husband, ashamed that it might mean sexual favours yet steadfast in her love and devotion even through that potentiality. Lorenz Hart sees himself in Bogart when he quotes this line twice in Blue Moon , aware that a comment of seemingly insensitive despair is paired with an act of pure selflessness -Bogart does rig the husband’s roulette game in his favour. But Hart doesn’t have so readily available a noble victory at hand. He’s only got his liquor. That Hart’s is an obscure name today in spite of a twenty-five year modestly successful partnership with composer Richard Rodgers, prior t...

Nouvelle Vague. The French New Wave -arguably the most important artistic movement in film history. In the span of just a handful of years more than a hundred young French filmmakers made their debuts, often coming from the worlds of academia, philosophy, and criticism - Cahiers du Cinema most notably- and making movies markedly different from those of the previous generation. It was a fresh and exciting period dominated by inspired eccentric personalities driven by intense creativity and a desire to experiment with the potential of their art. And yet the French New Wave does not have that reputation today -at least among most. Movies belonging to its pantheon are often hard to introduce to average moviegoers, unable to see or understand the appeal of what was being done then and what it meant. Stuffy and pretentious are the words that most commonly occur in such discussions of the Nouvelle Vague (especially if you insist on calling it “the Nouvelle Vague”). And probably none has contr...

The ghosts that haunt the figures of this movie and by proxy their audience, are real. Not so literally, but for nary making an appearance they are frightfully present all throughout the experience of watching Sound of Falling , the chronicle across generations of various families living in an ancient farmhouse in northern Germany. Whether they derive from the history of the place or the links between the traumas of specifically the women and girls there, or just from some other force that imbues the home’s residents with a morbid curiosity around death -it is unclear. But their presence is undeniable. Mascha Schilinski’s enigmatic and powerful epic drama which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival,is an utterly entrancing thing to experience. Psychologically transporting as much as spiritually so, it makes for a unique and resonating -as well as chilling- broad view portrait of distinctly feminine perspectives and anxieties over the span of a century, rendered grand in atmosp...