Reviews of the Bosch

The idea behind Yesterday  is perfectly on-brand for Richard Curtis, its’ producer and screenwriter. A movie set in a world without The Beatles and the one guy remembering them gaining fame off of their songs is exactly in his wheelhouse of retro-themed, charmingly satirical, and music obsessed sensibility. That it’s also very distinctly British and unapologetically romantic only accentuates his calling card on the project. Yet it’s directed by Danny Boyle, which is hard to believe given how restrained it is. There’s not much of Boyle’s character on the film, it’s remarkably light compared to his other movies, entirely based around a simple curiosity. But simplicity is underrated, and perhaps the unusual combination of creative forces on this film could yield something more than just another in a long long line of Beatles love letters. Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), a struggling singer-songwriter in Suffolk is hit by a bus during a mass global blackout and awakens to discover th...

There comes a point in Spider-Man: Far From Home  when new superhero Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) asks Peter Parker (Tom Holland) what does he want. The impetus for the question is Peter’s reluctance to partake in a superhero mission while on vacation with his class. He’s also under immense pressure from both Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and the media to fill the void left by Iron Man. The dichotomy between his heroic sense of justice and his desire to be an ordinary teenager has always been an integral part of Spider-Man’s identity and one of the chief reasons he has resonated so powerfully over the decades. And the MCU has yet to really explore that, although Far From Home nearly does. Peters’ answer to the aforementioned question is to join his class and ask out his crush, forsaking his “great responsibility”, and it has consequences -emphasizing the impossibility for him to live just one life. Marvel and Sony likewise are in a place of questionable identities pertaining t...

“I had another dream.” Akira Kurosawa had a lot on his mind in his later years, and his 1990 movie Dreams  was his way of expressing it all in as close to tangible terms as he could. Coming five years after his last great epic Ran , it was the perfect movie to end his extraordinary career on (though he made two more before his death in 1998); being not only a supremely underrated movie but possibly Kurosawa’s most personal –it was his first since 1945 that he wrote independently.  The film is comprised of a series of eight largely unrelated vignettes (though the last four seem to be linked by their themes and the presence of a wanderer protagonist played by Akira Terao -who looks suspiciously like Kurosawa himself). Each is supposedly based on recurring dreams Kurosawa has had throughout his life, and they’re utterly fascinating -from the dreamlike “Sunshine Through the Rain”, about a boy paying the price for his curiosity, to “The Tunnel”, an unnerving...

Of all the crime spree couple films to come out of the New Hollywood boom in the wake of Bonnie and Clyde , Terrence Malick’s Badlands  is probably the least exciting. That’s by design of course; the acclaimed directors’ debut film is a slow and laid-back reinterpretation of that sub-genre, and perhaps a rebuke of the energetic, high stakes counter-culture-swathed format it inspired in imitators like Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway and Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express . This approach definitely yields some drawbacks, such as a lack of any momentum through most of the film, and Malick’s weaknesses as a filmmaker make themselves apparent, but there’s something about the cool, lulling atmosphere of Badlands that makes it unique and fascinating, certainly when it was so noticeably going against the grain of what was popular in Hollywood at the time. Loosely based on the Starkweather homicides, it’s about a teenage girl, Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek) who falls for an older grea...

How do we define our family? Is it merely our clan, the group we are born into to whom we’re related by blood? Or is it rather a unit we find for ourselves; a collection of kind or like-minded people with whom we identify and understand? To some, perhaps many, it’s both. It’s becoming increasingly more common to recognize that a family, irrespective of relation, are simply the people who love and support us –that a close friend or partner may be more familial than a biological parent or sibling ever could be. The term ‘family’ and its associated vocabulary often comes with moral connotations as well: a (generally) upstanding man instructing someone younger on the road to reaching a form of maturity is customarily considered a father figure, media that is usually perceptively simplistic and non-threatening is deemed “family-friendly”, etc. This implies a universally shared idea of family and its virtuous expectations. However, when you get right down to it, a family, even in an art...

A sequel to Toy Story 3  always felt like a remarkably bad idea. There are only a few perfect movie trilogies: The Lord of the Rings , the  Apu  trilogy, the Before  trilogy, possibly the original Star Wars  trilogy, and the Toy Story  trilogy. Despite being made years apart (eleven between the second and third), they really felt like one story tied together through an increasingly evolving theme about growing up, which meant something so powerful for those of us who grew up with the series. Toy Story 3  was the perfect conclusion, ending with one of the most beautifully bittersweet closures of a movie series in recent memory. Nine years later though, Toy Story 4  comes to cinemas, directed by up-and-coming Pixar animator Josh Cooley, attempting to continue the story. It’s a monumental task to match up, and the movie doesn’t. But it is a very worthy addendum to the series, and specifically for the character of Woody. Two years after Andy do...

Rafiki . Friend. There is a very particular reason director Wanuri Kahiu titled her Kenyan lesbian drama with that Swahili word. As she explained in an interview for Much Ado About Cinema , it is a reference to the fact same-sex couples in countries like Kenya have to disguise their intimate relationship as being one between friends in order to maintain safety. This harsh reality is the central focus of this movie; a sweet, profound, and colourful exploration of the identities and relationship of two girls living in a highly bigoted society. Kena (Samantha Mugatsia) is a girl in Nairobi studying to be a nurse while also aiding in her father’s (Jimmy Gathu) local election campaign. She becomes smitten however with Ziki (Sheila Munyiva), the daughter of her fathers’ political opponent. As the girls spend more time together a Romeo and Juliet -esque romance gradually blossoms, but danger lurks around each corner, especially from their own families, if they happen to b...

The Dead Don’t Die  is a zombie movie by Jim Jarmusch, and it’s exactly as strange, offbeat, and bewilderingly entertaining as that sounds. In a way it makes sense; the acclaimed indie director recently dived into the vampire genre with Only Lovers Left Alive , so a zombie movie very much in the vein of the original Night of the Living Dead  but filtered through his unique lens, seems like a natural next step. It also gives him the opportunity to play around with a kind of gore he hasn’t depicted before and of course, as is the tradition of zombie movies, some relevant social commentary. Set in a small midwestern town called Centerville during a strange global crisis which most of the townsfolk are ignorant about, the dead begin to come back to life and attack the living. The film follows the local placid police force, Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray), Officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver), and Officer Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny) attempting to deal with it, as oth...