Reviews of the Bosch

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The Peasants: A Dim Artistic Marvel

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

The Screw-You Letters

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 stuffy 1920s E

Frenetic and Disorienting, Dev Patel’s Action Debut Makes a Stand

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 British bodies,

The Criterion Channel Presents: Sorcerer (1977)

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 against the movie when it came out. But

Godzilla x Kong: Journey to the Centre of the Earth

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. And so, The New

Back to the Feature: The Informer (1935)

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 earlier, it’s repu