Tag / ciaran hinds

by Jaime Rebanal

‘Belfast’ Review: So Personal yet So Sterile

✯✯½

Kenneth Branagh has established himself over the years as one of the most prolific Shakespearean actors – both on the screen and working behind the scenes. With Belfast, he opts to tell a story that should bring him closer to home, to how he saw his childhood in Ireland. While it’s easy enough to see that Branagh’s heart is in the right place when telling a movie about growing up during the Troubles, perhaps there’s something missing to supposedly meaningful revisiting of one’s own childhood. Branagh certainly is a well-meaning director, but the reminiscences of the past don’t really add up to all that much in return.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Neil Armstrong Biopic First Man is One Giant Leap for Damien Chazelle and Ryan Gosling: TIFF Review

✯✯✯✯½

I’ll be perfectly honest, the idea of a biopic being made about Neil Armstrong was not something I could so easily be sold on but of course expectations would have been made higher with the fact that Damien Chazelle would be set to direct. Following up on La La Land, Chazelle doesn’t solely focus only on the trip to the moon and back, but the journey right from Earth all about what it would have taken to ensure that the moon landing would be as perfect as it was. But in capturing the life-threatening journey that would have ensured the safety of one man in order to make a giant leap for mankind through as much as a small step on the moon, what Damien Chazelle has created in First Man celebrates how far humanity can go if they really strive to remain together to achieve something that would come to define history.

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by Jaime Rebanal

There Will Be Blood is a Crowning Achievement in the Highest Order

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Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is a film of many great moments, but between each of the many sequences that we have com to recognize over the years comes rewarding buildup and those great moments end up feeling much greater. But how exactly do you cover something that appeals to every sense the same way that There Will Be Blood does? For one, it would already be easy enough to say that Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the best working American filmmakers, but it’s just amazing to think about how a director of his age can so smoothly transition between completely different points of time and settings and they still feel so distinct under his own vision. You can start off by saying that Paul Thomas Anderson is one of our best working filmmakers, because there’s no other working American filmmaker that has established this consistency of making films that always end up becoming the best of their own kind.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Justice League – Review

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My friend Noah Miles wrote in his Spider-Man: Homecoming review, “I don’t know if Jon Watts is a good director. I really don’t. It’s impossible to tell from this, although the direction here is probably the worst I’ve seen so far this year, because Marvel reshoots everything and rarely allows directors creative freedom to take risks and do something visually interesting.” It was the first thing that came into my head after having left Justice League, because from the many reshoots that came along since Zack Snyder left the production after the death of his daughter, you can really tell this isn’t so much of a Zack Snyder film. As a matter of fact, it seems more like the traces of a butchered plan that were haphazardly stitched together as a means of trying to appeal to the masses. The sad thing is, there’s barely enough about Justice League as it stands that truly works.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Silence (2016) – Review

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Growing up in a Catholic family, there’s a part of Silence that would have spoken towards my own experience. But I’ve grown up later with a lack of sureness in my faith and soon it became clear to me why Martin Scorsese’s most recent effort only were set to have grabbed me as much as it did. After Casino, Scorsese seems to have gone from a consistent track record to a more hit-and-miss run with an occasional gem like Bringing Out the Dead or The Wolf of Wall Street and then come disappointments like Shutter Island or The Departed. I feel happy enough to say that with Silence, Scorsese has indeed made his best film in the 21st century and thus his best film since Casino. Regrettably I was unable to have seen it in theaters and after having finally seen it, the wait was more than worth it. With Silence, what we have on the spot may be the closest thing we’ll ever get to a modern day Ingmar Bergman film in a sense.

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