Reviews of the Bosch

For coming up on seven months now, we’ve been seeing horrifying brutal images of the atrocities being carried out in Gaza. A world away we’ve seen the bodies, the famine, the missile drops, the devastation. If you have any kind of a heart it has been broken by this. And much of it has come courtesy of journalists and photographers intrepidly communicating those horrors for the world to see. War photography is vital in a world of mass media, and indeed related to this present crisis has had a tangible effect -without it you can be sure Israel wouldn’t be as diplomatically isolated as it currently is. But there’s something quintessentially disturbing about war photography too. About going into lethal crisis zones simply to witness carnage. And we don’t talk enough about how  traumatizing that is. Or what it means for one’s humanity to power through it. This is what is unexpectedly at the centre of Alex Garland’s Civil War  -a film that imagines a second factional war in the Unit...

There is a curiously irreconcilable contradiction to The Peasants . Here is a movie that is compositionally beautiful -visually and aesthetically enrapturing in every frame on a level few animated movies achieve; and yet the subject of this imagery is so often dour and grim, even horrific in some beats. What you are looking at is depressing, uncompromising, and yet it is rendered with such vividness, with mesmerizing craft. It is a challenging effect, leaving you as impressed as you are disturbed. I have no idea why directors Dorota “DK” and Hugh Welchman, who brought to life the visionary animation masterpiece Loving Vincent several years back, chose as their follow-up project an adaptation of Władysław Reymont’s turn-of-the-century Nobel Prize-winning epic novel The Peasants -a stark impression of life in a poor Polish farming village. It’s quite a shift in tone granted, for the pair and their legion of artists -hand-painting the film as in Loving Vincent one frame at a time off of ...

There is an art to profanity in film and television. It’s easy for a writer or an actor to simply insert ‘fuck’ after every other word, but if the point is to punctuate a dialogue or shock the audience this doesn’t amount to much. There needs to be something spontaneous or creative to the explicit language for it to really transcend. The British political satire The Thick of It was a notable masterclass in pronounced inventive swearing, with the colourful turns of phrase coming out of the mouth of Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker extraordinarily memorable. Usually of course, cursing isn’t really a substantive aspect of a movie enough for this to mean anything -but occasionally one will indulge, at which point it does matter. And something like Martin Scorsese’s Casino  is pretty good. Thea Sharrock’s Wicked Little Letters  is less so. This is a movie where the profanity is a primary gimmick, as it revolves around the circulation of vulgar letters from a mystery source in a stuff...

Monkey Man  is Dev Patel’s passion project, though it’s Jordan Peele who is to thank for the form of its release. It was he who saved the movie from Netflix, who had acquired it as mere platform real estate before nearly having it shelved due to concerns about how its contentious political themes would play for Indian audiences. Peele saw a cut of the movie, came on as a producer, and persuaded Universal to acquire it for a wide theatrical release. Suddenly this little movie that might have amounted to nothing is an action blockbuster with the same breadth as John Wick . An excellent and admirable use of one’s power in Hollywood. And apart from its specific energized action, there is an urgency to Monkey Man  that warrants the scope of its theatrical release -for countries around the world but especially for India itself (where unfortunately it may be the least likely to be seen ). Even as it is strictly an outsider film, produced and funded largely through American and Britis...

William Friedkin’s Sorcerer  has a subtle but powerful reputation among cinephiles. A relatively little-known movie from the director of The French Connection  and The Exorcist that flopped hard at the box office (to be fair, it was overshadowed by the mania that was Star Wars  just a month earlier)  and with critics of the time;  but those who have seen it in the years since have sung its praises so adamantly and so often that it’s hard for even fairly casual movie-literate fans not to have heard of it by now. The film is particularly noted for its suspense, and for its eye-catching poster depicting a truck weighing down a precarious rope bridge in the middle of a jungle. On a slightly more obscure level it’s known for a chaotic production in the Dominican Republic that could almost rival  Apocalypse Now . Sorcerer  is mostly a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s  The Wages of Fear -itself of course a world cinema classic- and this too was weighed ...

Godzilla Minus One  really did ruin every American monster movie, didn’t it? Granted, they were never great to begin with -Legendary’s MonsterVerse series has not yet produced a movie that hasn’t been mediocre; but Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla reinvention last year really highlighted both the flaws in this recent crop of kaiju-as-superhero movies and moreover how easily they could actually be made good. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire  cost thirteen times as much as Minus One , and yet it looks and feels so cheap by comparison. Yet even without that film so fresh in the memory, this latest monster mash, once again directed by Adam Wingard, spins its wheels in an effort to justify its continued existence. And it’s a problem baked into the fabric of the movie. Once you get to Godzilla vs. Kong  there’s really nowhere left to go in terms of upping the stakes or creating new spectacle -especially considering the franchise can have no resolution to that match-up of dominance. A...

The Informer  is a movie all about the IRA that never once mentions the IRA. Made in 1935, the second adaptation of a novel by Liam O’Flaherty, it is a movie that probably should not have been attempted in the circumstances it was. Even with thirteen years passing since publication, it was a story deeply topical and deeply political -concerning the strife in Ireland that most Americans were wilfully ignorant of. In fact most of them still are -though highly relevant as a touchstone, especially given current affairs of much greater public interest, the “Troubles” means nothing to the average person on this side of the Atlantic. And a movie like The Informer  only serves to make that subject matter more vague. However, it was regarded very highly at the time of its release. It was widely praised, decently influential, and even for a few decades appeared on several lists of Best Movies Ever Made. Like a previous entry in this series though,   Cavalcade  from a few years...

Among his many great and useful quotes, one of Roger Ebert’s best observations was this: “no good movie is ever too long and no bad movie is ever short enough.” And it’s true. It doesn’t matter if a movie is eighty minutes or four hours, if it’s good you’ll either be satisfied or want more of it, if it’s bad you want it over as soon as possible. Lately there’s been a lot of talk about movie lengths (it was even the subject of the most attention Killers of the Flower Moon  got Oscar night ); but not about short bad movies, about long good ones. There has been a semi-revival lately of long movies -long as in two and a half to three and a half hours, and with it has come significant criticism from some viewers. But it’s not criticism directed at the movies themselves for their own contents, which would be perfectly reasonable. In spite of my broad statement just now on “good long movies”, there are obviously solid, reasoned, good-faith criticisms of any number of these, from Killers o...