Reviews of the Bosch

Throughout most of Passages , the new movie by queer indie filmmaker Ira Sachs, it is incredibly easy to hate Tomas (Franz Rogowski). This is a guy who through no one’s fault but his own ruins both his long-term relationship and the affair that he thought would become something more via his toxic co-dependency and a small helping of emotional manipulation. He only seems concerned as far as his own feelings go and how much others validate them. You feel irritated by him, frustrated -you can’t wait for his partners to leave. But then, right in the end stretch, you feel pity. This poor idiot desperate to be loved gains a new dimension of humanity -that has been lingering through all of his bullshit and just needed the right context to be made fully palpable. There are a lot of conflicted feelings evoked by this movie -appropriate given it is about conflicted feelings in a romantic and sexual sense. Sachs is somewhat known in the American independent scene for his more complex depictions o...

There are so few chilling horror films these days -by which I mean horror movies that don’t aim to startle so much as send a shiver up your spine. One of the best movies that has ever had that effect for me is Robert Wise’s original adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting . And Carnival of Souls , from just a year earlier, has that same effect -perhaps even more so. A moody, mysterious, creeping and hypnotic piece as transfixing as it is both palpably and psychologically terrifying. Before George Romero, Tobe Hooper, or Sam Raimi, there was Herk Harvey -one of the first great independent horror filmmakers. His background was in theatre and freelance directing gigs for educational and training films, through a small company based in Lawrence, Kansas. He developed Carnival of Souls  with one of his colleagues John Clifford, and they were able to raise about half of the $30,000 budget through basically courting investments from local businesses. All this is to emphasize just how...

There’s something special about John Carney’s cinematic love letters to music that pierces through cynicism and warms the heart, even under the least impressive circumstances. Once should be unremarkable in its simplicity, but it is tender and soulful; Sing Street  should be mere 80s nostalgia-bait, but it’s fun and inspiring. It’s easy to credit that to the music, which is so vital a character in Carney’s films and what tends to be what most people remember from them. However, I think there is a rich humanity to his writing, and the way he develops his characters as well that accounts for how his movies consistently work. And I don’t think that’s anywhere more apparent than in Flora and Son , his first movie in seven years (in the meantime, he’s developed, written, and directed much of the series Modern Love ). This is a movie that really doesn’t seem to have much going for it on paper –even its premise is fairly weak, and yet it is ultimately quite delightful. It’s a low-key dome...

2023 is the year of Wes Anderson. Five films that he has made have come out this year (more if you count all that material from his back catalogue bastardized for those A.I. monstrosities that made the rounds among the worst people on social media). And it is remarkable how inventive and interesting each of them are. Four of them, each under forty minutes long but totalling about an hour and a half, came to Netflix this weekend one day after the other: a series of adaptations of minor Roald Dahl short stories -the kind you likely wouldn’t have heard of unless you were a particularly enthusiastic Dahl fan. It’s not the first time of course Anderson has pulled from the classic British children’s novelist - Fantastic Mr. Fox  is one of his most celebrated movies. But with this series, he endeavours to translate the more adult work of Dahl -the stuff beyond Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , Matilda , and The BFG . Works that clearly have a deep resonance with him. The principal of th...

As it was happening just under two years ago I predicted the GameStop squeeze would be turned into a movie. And I know that wasn’t a unique observation -the sheer strangeness of it and how it exposed the idiocy of Wall Street had a real Wolf of Wall Street  vibe even as it was playing out in real time. I’m only surprised how quickly it took. Dumb Money  is the official dramatization of those events, directed by Craig Gillespie with that trademark sardonic tone of his I, Tonya and Pam & Tommy as it revels in the story of online nobodies gaming the system and taking down hedge funds.  And there’s a fair bit of cathartic fun in that, even as the movie streamlines and sanitizes its narrative quite a bit. I mean this is a movie that prominently features Reddit as a plot device, and as a force of some good -which in itself is a concept jarring to think about. So of course for the sake of good taste it has to be scrubbed of much of the toxicity of that platform. Likewise, s...

If Gareth Edwards has a singular strength as a director, it is his gift for conveying scale. It was the dominant quality of his Godzilla as well as Rogue One . He knows how to make his worlds striking, his visuals imposing. And The Creator , his first original film in thirteen years, is a test of how far that can go when not supported by the iconography of a popular franchise. It is of course a risky move not often taken by studios anymore to make a science-fiction movie not based in an existing intellectual property. That Edwards managed to get it done and looking so good off of a comparatively mid-sized budget for a movie these days is impressive. But The Creator  also shows that beyond his visual tenacity, he’s not all that compelling a storyteller. It is unfortunate timing that The Creator , a movie that digs into that old sci-fi staple of artificial intelligence and the notions of transhumanism surrounding it, should come out at a time when A.I. is at the forefront of this ind...

At various points, particularly during the matches in Cassandro , director Roger Ross Williams will cut between the conventional filming style most of the movie is shot in and manufactured cheaper footage, as though recorded on a videotape or broadcast on 90s television. Perhaps it is a means of transposing the kind of format inter-cutting he is so used to as a documentarian ( Cassandro  is his first narrative feature). But there is clearly more to it than that. There is a relationship between these bits and the television luchador fights a young Saúl Armendáriz watched with his dad on T.V. They exemplify his journey of becoming part of that world while connecting him with his past and relationships long lost. If nothing else it is an inventive way of breaking up certain scenes in a largely formulaic though still compelling biographic sports movie -one that is relatively distinct in its focus on Mexican lucha libre wrestling along the Chihuahua-Texas border. It’s the story of ...

A shame it took me so long to take a look at the work of Ida Lupino. I mean I’d seen her in a couple movies here and there, but never before focused on her far more meaningful career as a director. And she was a seminal one -virtually the only woman director active during the Golden Age of Hollywood. For her Filmmakers production company, she made several thematically ambitious, often socially conscious movies unlike anything being produced at the time for the bigger studios: films about unwed pregnancy, sexual assault, serial killers, struggles with polio -and her name recognition as an actress gave her and these films credibility. In her later years she worked mostly in television, where she directed among other shows the scariest episode of The Twilight Zone  I’ve seen (“The Masks” -it’ll give you nightmares). And even though she never identified with the term, she has long been upheld as a major figure of feminist film history. The last film of her peak directing era and one of...