Reviews of the Bosch

It’s rather fitting that the first professional movie I’ve seen seemingly set in Saskatchewan is about people trying to get out of Saskatchewan. Firecrackers is the feature debut of writer-director Jasmin Mozaffari, based on her own short film from years before. And recently it won her the Best Director Award at this years’ Canadian Screen Awards (the film also took home Best Editing), and after watching it it’s pretty clear why. Mozaffari has both a sublime sense of cinema and a determination to use the form to say something important. It would be foolish not to expect greater things from this young filmmaker. This story is centred around two girls in a rural small town, Lou (Michaela Kurimsky) and Chantal (Karena Evans), who are desperate to get out of its repressive, suffocating atmosphere, with big plans to travel as far as New York with the money they’ve earned working at a local motel. But their hopes are derailed by a series of unforeseen circumstances, not least of whi...

Shazam! is the most off-brand DC movie yet. Occupying the same universe as the tiresome grim-dark slogs of Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman , it’s unbelievable to see them put out a film that’s light-hearted and self-aware to the point of almost looking like a parody along the lines of The Tick . But to do  Shazam! in a serious way would be a mistake given this is a character created in the 1930s (under the name Captain Marvel funny enough), and unlike his contemporaries has not aged as well. This is very much a campy and ridiculous comic book character, and Shazam! did the smart thing in recognizing that. Even with its fun sensibility and spirit though, this movie has layers to it, and is more than just a superhero comedy. Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is a fourteen year old kid who’s been in and out of foster homes for a decade, frequently getting in trouble over his increasingly elaborate attempts to find his mother who he lost at a carnival when he was little. After bein...

When I was a kid the Walt Disney Company was in the business of milking their decades’ worth of iconic characters, stories, and intellectual properties by barraging the market with direct-to-video sequels to their most popular movies. And while a handful like The Lion King 2 , Bambi 2 , and parts of Return to Neverland  were half decent, most of them were cynical disposable garbage. That trend ended not long after Michael Eisner’s resignation, but Disney’s interest in shameless catering to nostalgia survived, and the current equivalent to the direct-to-video sequels are the live-action remakes, which are just as awful but more obnoxious as they’re being put in theatres. There are three of these monstrosities opening in 2019 starting with Dumbo , thus far the oldest Disney movie receiving this treatment. And it’s coming courtesy of Tim Burton of all people, whose distinctive style doesn’t quite seem to fit the mould of the 1941 film, which is a sweet and simple kids’ movie ab...

I was lucky enough to see Mirai , the latest film from animation master Mamoru Hosoda in a theatre -a small theatre, but a theatre nonetheless -the environment in which the film was clearly meant to be seen in. Like his other works it’s an obscenely visual movie, improving on previous effort Summer Wars  in its CG effects, and echoing  Wolf Children  and The Boy and the Beast  in its overwhelming beauty and its core theme of family. At the last Oscars, in one of the few good decisions made by the Academy this year, it became the first non-Studio Ghibli anime to be nominated; and while you could argue what other animes also deserved that recognition you can’t deny this one doesn’t, a sentimental yet chaotic portrait of a toddler’s relationship to his new infant sister. The film is about a young family in Yokohama living in a modernist home with a great tree in the courtyard. After the birth of their second child Mirai (which literally means “future”), older bro...

As much as the phrase is overused, you rarely see “perfect casting” in movies. It’s not often that an actor is cast in a part at just the right time that it’s apparent nobody could have performed it better. Even parts written for specific actors aren’t usually dependent on that person. However perfect casting does exist, and David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth  is a great example. Nobody could have played the role of the elusive and enigmatic alien at the centre of Nicolas Roeg’s sci-fi drama as precisely and uniquely as the already iconic, androgynous, unusual twenty-eight year old musical Starman. The Man Who Fell to Earth  is a captivating beast, not like any science-fiction movie I’ve ever seen. Sure it’s got a fair bit in common with visitor narratives like The Day the Earth Stood Still , but its style and feel is wholly its own. Screenwriter Paul Mayersberg and the late Nicolas Roeg adapted it from a book by Walter Tevis, but Roeg’s presentational and tonal c...

Certain media, if it hits you at the right time, has a way of impacting you in lasting, even formative ways. Perhaps it can help shape your sensibilities and your understanding of the world. Or maybe it can just revitalize your interest in a genre in a completely new way by showing you how dynamic that genre really is. There have been a handful of such media in my life, and one of them has been Futurama . Since discovering it,  I have seen T.V. animation that has been more challenging, more artistically impressive, and more revolutionary, but Futurama remains my personal favourite animated series. That’s not to say the show is without its’ feats of quality. Indeed, Futurama  is still one of the smartest comedy series I’ve ever seen and perhaps the most consistently creative. Its’ fans know just how quotable it is, and few sitcoms have earned their emotional peaks so well. Futurama  was already set in the future when it first aired on March 28 t...

Jordan Peele may well be the best horror director of the decade, and at the start of it you would never have guessed. He has a really particular feel for the genre, understanding both the importance and the technique of mood, tension, imagery, and performance that has made classics. Get Out  was an amazing debut, masking sharp racial satire and cogent social commentary in layers of harrowing suspense and mystique, and though Us  doesn’t top Peele’s Oscar-winning predecessor, it’s probably the best American horror film to come out since. After a traumatic experience as a child at a Santa Cruz Hall of Mirrors, Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) is returning to the area with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and their children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex), to spend the summer at their new beach house. But at night, four strangers show up and attack, revealed to be sinister doppelgängers of the family armed with scissors. The Wilsons are forced to fend for...

Mafia stories have become so entrenched in our popular culture that it’s sometimes hard to believe in their real-world roots. Watching Birds of Passage , an epic Columbian gangster movie directed by Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra, I frequently recalled the likes of The Godfather , The Sopranos , even Boardwalk Empire , seeing the mafia movie clichés play out and their character types making appearances. However this movie is based in real history, real figures, and a real drug war that consumed the Wayuu clans of northern Columbia for two decades. It’s easier to believe in movie tropes than in their real world progenitors. But it’s the crossroads of gangster culture and the Wayuu tradition that makes Birds of Passage  most compelling and distinct. The way it illustrates how each impacted the other and the lives that became changed and entangled in it is quite enrapturing. After two Wayuu families unite through marriage, the new young patriarch Rapayet Pushana (José ...