Tag / alexa demie

by Jaime Rebanal

‘Waves’ TIFF Review: Trey Edward Shults’s Third Film is a Beautifully Chaotic Family Melodrama

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The third feature film of Trey Edward Shults, Waves is a family drama in the veins of his previous films yet one that also punches down at your emotions without any sort of compromise whatsoever. If anything else best captures what makes the experience of watching Waves every bit as powerful as it is, the title alone would already represent the sort of dynamics between family and friends that you’re seeing onscreen as they take on differing forms from start to finish. There’s no filmmaker working today with the same sort of eye for creating family dramas like Trey Edward Shults, and seeing how he adapts his distinctive style to different forms of storytelling will forever be fascinating to me.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Jonah Hill’s Directorial Debut Mid90s and the Encapsulation of Time: TIFF Review

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To talk about Jonah Hill’s Mid90s one would have to mention how much a testament to said era this film truly feels like. But it also feels like very perfect material for him to cover knowing that he already had been made big thanks to the coming of age genre with Superbad, but I would never have suspected that anything near as good as this. Mid90s isn’t a film that shallowly builds itself upon a love for that place in time, but it’s a film that seeks to capture all the good and bad memories that have formed our own sense of nostalgia – if anything better creates a perfect time capsule from said era. Like the best coming-of-age films, the formation from a memory isn’t something new, yet the brutality of the honesty on the screen can also make such films resonate. Don’t think of this as being Jonah Hill’s answer to Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird from last year, but like said film, it’s his own capsule of what shaped him to be the person he is – and it all plays to such a wonderful onscreen testament.

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