Tag / jeffrey donovan

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

Sicario: Day of the Soldado is an Unnecessary Sequel That Leaves a Bitter Taste in the Mouth

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I still stand by Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario being one of the best films to have come out in recent years but the idea of a sequel being made was always something that left me highly skeptical. While the involvement of Taylor Sheridan was one thing that held me onto the idea of making a sequel, I was also left wondering where else would they have to go in making a sequel. Part of that was answered when I saw Sicario: Day of the Soldado yet another chunk of that question was only left unfulfilled because it only leaves a bitter taste in the mouth afterwards. Gone is the nuance that made Sicario wonderful, and instead you have enough violence to build what could easily have been a great 80’s action movie if the movie never took itself nearly as seriously as it did. But because the film takes itself so seriously, it never rises above the machismo that is on full display here, thus lacking the same impact that Villeneuve had employed in order to make Sicario work so beautifully.

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