Tag / dan stevens

by Jaime Rebanal

‘Lucy in the Sky’ TIFF Review: Noah Hawley’s Directorial Debut Falls Short of the Diamonds

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Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies, somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly, Natalie Portman arrives with kaleidoscope eyes. Television legend Noah Hawley of Fargo and Legion promises as much with his feature film directorial debut, but even the thought of a film about a woman’s journey to outer space and back sounds too good to be true after fittingly being named for a Beatles song. Yet as Lucy rises up to the sky, you’re wondering where all the diamonds are, for Lucy in the Sky doesn’t shine as much as you’d want something that sounds like a jewel to do so. It isn’t a bad movie per se, but given the sort of potential that this could have been considering the talent involved, Lucy in the Sky should have been a diamond – but it just never quite gets to that level.

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by Jaime Rebanal

‘Her Smell’ Review: Elisabeth Moss Explodes in This Punk Rock Tragedy

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An extreme assault on one’s own senses, one that takes you in like a great punk rock song. In Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell, you’re only left with this vague title describing something that can mean anything. It could even mean something pleasant because she’s wearing a whole lot of perfume in order to put on some fragrance for the show, but that’s also a part of what makes the whole film so wonderful in the same sense too. The third pairing of Alex Ross Perry and Elisabeth Moss isn’t only the most stressful film that they’ve made together, but it’s also the most chaotic of the sort. It’s chaotic in the sense that it shrouds you in everything that could lead to its own main character’s downfall, but Perry does not simply make his film only about the plight that one suffers in that sense. If there’s anything else that Alex Ross Perry has added to his own body of work with Her Smell, it’s a cementation for Perry’s name being among the most distinctive voices in American independent cinema. For all that said talent would be worth, this is where he finds himself having made his most significant work yet.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Beauty and the Beast (2017) – Review

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As I was about to watch Bill Condon’s new take on Beauty and the Beast a growing skepticism was only arising on my own end with the fact I had only recently rewatched Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise’s original film, for it not only remains my favourite of Disney’s animated films but one of my own all-time favourite films. Therefore with Disney’s recent trend of live-action reboots of their animated classics I felt that there was a possibility that something new could have only been brought to the table but I’ve had a running issue with these films as they can’t seem to find much about themselves in order to allow each entry to stand apart from the original. It seems to have run again with Beauty and the Beast, a fairly competently made one but to some extent what I thought it would be overall.

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