Reviews of the Bosch

After a serene opening credits, Paul Schrader’s new movie, Master Gardener , begins exactly how you’d expect: on a shot of a man handwriting a journal at a desk by lamplight. It’s a veritable clich é with Schrader at this point, each movie he makes has to have something of that Winter Light -influenced imagery in tandem with the “man in a room” structure of character exploration he’s virtually made his own. At this point it is still a feature not a bug of his approach -stirringly composed and substantively curious; and he uses it sparingly here compared to something like First Reformed although it is just as important. Master Gardener marks the third in what Schrader considers a kind of thematic trilogy, consisting also of First Reformed and The Card Counter -all movies that centre on isolated, outwardly apathetic men internally wrestling with an all-consuming anxiety related to some troubling facet of modern society, be it the climate crisis, the repercussions of the War on Terror,...

“Will anyone show up?” is the question every artist has when putting their work on display for the public for the first time. Here is the endpoint of all that inspiration and hard work, but will anybody care? To be an artist, especially a working one, is to manage the anxiety of how something that means a lot to you will be received by not only strangers, but friends, family, and (most harrowingly) other artists. It’s the kind of thing though that seems to be very internalized by Michelle Williams’ Lizzy, a relatively inconspicuous Portland sculptor, in Kelly Reichardt’s latest indie project Showing Up . She keeps up appearances, maintains a stone-faced impartiality –but subject to the judgement of those like her artist father (Judd Hirsch) and fellow artist landlord Jo (Hong Chau), we see the insecurity beneath the surface. Subtlety is one of Reichardt’s great specialties, and never more so than when channeled through her greatest collaborator, Michelle Williams. Whether it is her und...

In the last few years, superhero movies have generally come to be exhausting. Superhero multiverse movies designed largely to synergize brands especially so. But ground zero for that trend is a movie that breathed a whole new life and energy into the genre and expanded what it could do like no other. Much as others have endeavoured to latch on to the conceptual idea that colours 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse , none have captured those qualities of style and spirit that really gave Spider-Verse  its power, that made it unquestionably in the conversation with the greatest superhero movies of all time (and I for one would make that case for it ). Five years later as both the MCU and DCCU attempt to make their versions of the multiverse work, the Spider-Verse  returns to explore and challenge this facet of superhero architecture just as it had the origin story before. And in so doing, it shows these other franchises how it’s done and demonstrates why they won’t suc...

Bones of Crows  is ultimately a feature-length Canada Heritage Minute. You know, those little dramatizations that used to play on CBC with often stilted dialogue meant to quickly educate on a certain notable moment of Canadian history. These were meant to make Canada look good, so they would never have touched something like the Residential Schools. But even coming at its material from an adverse angle, writer-director Marie Clements approaches her film from much the same vantage point of education and raising awareness mixed within the bounds of conventional drama. This prerogative is especially apparent by the end, which like those commercials, strives for a kind of catharsis that feels hollow and easy, when nothing about a movie such as this should. Bones of Crows  represents possibly the widest canvas an Indigenous movie has been made on in Canada since Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner , and while it is not the first movie to centre on the trauma of the residential school syste...

Vera  is in a lot of ways typical of early LGBTQ movies. It centres on a youth character who doesn’t fit in with the rigid confines of pervasive sexual expression, aspires to empathize and understand them as they go through a discovery of identity aided by a love interest to latch onto, and it ultimately ends in tragedy underscored by the whiff of a message against discrimination. But these elements considered, Vera  is also quite interesting in being a fairly early positive depiction of a transgender man -released in 1986- and certainly one of the first serious LGBTQ movies to come out of Brazil. Its lead actress, Ana Beatriz Nogueira won the Silver Bear award at that years’ Berlin Film Festival. And though I wouldn’t say it was an influence on later films like Boys Don’t Cry or The Danish Girl , it got to that story type before they did and did a better job with it. Though it is a “Bury Your Queers” movie, it’s a fairly sensitive one and in a few respects, ahead of its time....

It’s been a hot minute since we’ve had one of these, hasn’t it?  Can’t say I’ve missed them. One of the pleasures to watching 1989’s The Little Mermaid , the movie that kicked off the period known as the Disney Renaissance, is in taking in just how animated a movie it is. Sure it’s animated in the sense that it’s a cartoon, but I mean in the way that everything on screen is imbued with life, expression, and motion. Consider the ways that Ariel’s tail and her hair move underwater with free frenetic elasticity; or the various nuances of expression both large and small in her face, Sebastian’s, Ursula’s especially. Every visual detail of a scene is explicitly motivated, and the script, music, performances are all designed to accentuate that. There’s a reason it single-handedly pulled Disney out of a two decade slump and ushered in the studio’s second golden age. But now in the year of Disney’s 100 th  anniversary, while it is still arguably reaping the rewards of The Little Merma...

The sad story at the heart of A Thousand and One  feels intimately familiar. It sort of takes until the end and a major twist to truly reveal the depth of that, but there’s still a stirring resonance to the hard circumstances of a mother and son getting by in poverty over the course of a decade in New York; let alone the fact that their situation is an illegal one. Early in the movie, Inez de la Paz (Teyana Taylor), freshly released from a  six-year prison sentence finds her young son Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola) on a street corner in Brooklyn. He has been living through the highly toxic state foster system, which Inez herself is also a survivor of, and is bullied by his foster siblings. After an accident, Inez visits him in the hospital and decides to abduct him -determined to find a place and a means to raise him on her own. A.V. Rockwell’s directorial debut won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival -the award that in recent years has been won by movie...

A few years ago for this series, I watched Michael Cimino’s 1978 Oscar-winning war epic The Deer Hunter . It was a very good movie for a sophomore feature, one of the first to reckon with the legacy of Vietnam and do so in a critical way. And at the time Cimino was heralded one of the great new filmmakers to watch. He won an Academy Award , and because of this was given carte blanche on his next passion project -and we’ve heard this story in Hollywood before: the unfortunate narrative of the one-hit-wonder filmmaker like Alex Proyas, Richard Kelly, Neil Blomkamp. Directors whose first movie after a major success not only fails to live up, but seemingly curses the rest of their career. Cimino puts them all to shame with perhaps the greatest and quickest rise and fall of any filmmaker -that both asserted a predominant movement and subsequently brought it to its knees. Heaven’s Gate  is a very significant movie in Hollywood history, though not for the reasons Cimino hoped. One of the ...