Tag / kirsten dunst

by Jaime Rebanal

‘The Power of the Dog’ Review: Beautiful and Rugged on the Outside, Layered and Complex on the Inside

✯✯✯✯✯

For her third feature film, The Piano, Jane Campion became the first female filmmaker to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, for very good reason. With The Power of the Dog being her first feature film in over a decade, it is more than just a triumphant return to the screen for her. Throughout her career, Campion has been known for making films that delve into the psychology that fuels desire, spanning many periods of time – but with The Power of the Dog comes one of her most beautiful and highly sensual efforts to date. It’s a statement that I think can only ever be put lightly, but in The Power of the Dog, you’re seeing the more externalized emotions coming forth in what would be one of her most beautiful films to date.

Continue reading →
by Jaime Rebanal

‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ Review: How Miyazaki Finds Magic in What We Love

✯✯✯✯✯

Kiki’s Delivery Service is a film from my childhood that I had not revisited for so long, but to watch this Miyazaki classic in its native language for the first time after having been used to watching the dubbed version provided by Disney for so long only made the whole experience feel almost new to me. But all these years of having not seen Kiki’s Delivery Service have also made me look at the film under a new light; for something about it seems to click with me more as an adult now versus what I saw it to be as a kid. If that’s indicative of anything, it’s everything that one could expect from Hayao Miyazaki, and in a largely wonderful body of work, it’s yet another masterpiece.

Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

Sofia Coppola and How Male Obsession Amplifies Female Pain in The Virgin Suicides: A Review

✯✯✯✯✯

Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut The Virgin Suicides is a teen film with a dreamlike quality that is so rare for the genre, but it is within this quality alone where you have a directorial debut so fully realized it’s difficult to even believe that it was a first feature. Though to talk about what it is that this movie manages to accomplish as a teen drama, everything starts from the way in which it is structured – for it plays out like a fantasy in order to emphasize one’s perspective that understands circumstances like a mystery. In telling the story of the suicides of the Lisbon sisters, who have been loved by a group of teenage boys for obvious reasons, there is yet another dimension to this story that only a director like Sofia Coppola can bring to the table that would also make this one of the best teen films of the 90’s, let alone ever. As Sofia Coppola frames this as a story about teenage obsessions and how they affect the way we grow, what she also shows us in The Virgin Suicides is a darker side of growing up that is so often misunderstood by the images that have been set inside one’s head.

Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette Lives in the Glamour to the Fullest

✯✯✯✯½

Sofia Coppola’s body of work has always remained intriguing even when she isn’t exactly the most consistent filmmaker. It’s hard enough to imagine how she can follow up a film as beautiful as Lost in Translation but there was always the certain fear that after having directed her best film she would turn out another effort that proves itself hugely underwhelming and with Marie Antoinette comes the film that consensus has agreed upon as their worst effort to date but I also think it also makes a great case as to why her work is so intriguing. Given what would be expected of a period piece, especially one about the ill-fated Queen of France, it seems only fitting that Sofia Coppola took this outline and directed a film that details her life the way that one would only be able to imagine it must have been from her very own eyes, rather than one that sticks to tradition.

Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

The Beguiled (2017) – Review

✯✯✯✯

Unlike many other people who’ve also seen the original film directed by Don Siegel I’m not going to spend so much of the review drawing comparisons between said film and this new version as told by Sofia Coppola considering how they’re telling the same story with completely different intentions behind them. It’s easy to admire how Sofia Coppola drastically changes the pace of her own works so that she can set herself out to be a harder filmmaker to pinpoint stylistically, but this isn’t the first time she’s made a period piece – although there’s a certain playfulness that can be detected from her own experiments that allows her to remain distinctive. And although I haven’t consistently loved her work (Lost in Translation still remains the pinnacle of her own directorial efforts to myself), it was easy enough for me to recognize she’s a talented filmmaker to keep my eyes peeled for.

 

Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

Hidden Figures – Review

✯✯✯

In truth my expectations were never going to turn out incredibly high for Hidden Figures because it seemed like a rather safe approach upon a subject whose importance still remains intact with America’s history and I got exactly that. In some ways, Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures just came out to remind me of Tate Taylor’s The Help, in the sense that I was getting a feel-good film for American people that would make modern audiences feel better about what direction they’ve gone since, but in another it was a film whose good intentions went blanketed by stereotypes of the period appearing so bluntly – and it never sits well with me when these conflicting messages come about.

Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – Review

✯✯✯✯✯

A quick thought off the top of my head that came to me while I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that ultimately hit me much harder now, given how I usually live out as a pessimistic soul always living in fear of the worst. In person, I’m an incredibly shy introvert who always resorts to the comfort of my own self and thus I have always found communication with those outside of my circle so difficult, something contradictory to how I am online. Recently, I confessed to a friend whom I talked with very often on social media that I had a crush on her. And there’s an inner awkwardness that just gets to me again because I was unsure how she felt with this knowledge coming to her even with her responding that she was flattered, and the likeliness of us meeting up in real life. And already, I’ve drawn myself away from the film itself, but I keep entering a certain mood swing after what Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is leaving me to think of. Continue reading →