Tag / paweł pawlikowski

by Jaime Rebanal

2018: Another Year of Cinema Come and Gone

This year was a real game changer for a person like myself. To kick things off, it was the first year in which I was able to attend TIFF as a press member rather than as any other audience member. It was a defining moment for myself, though I don’t want to brag a little too much about what happened there. It was just a good year for cinema in general. That’s all I can really say, and I want to bring more attention to the many films that I absolutely loved this year – and so many of them came around this year and so forth. We’re already nearing the end of a decade, and through the good and the bad, the cinema has always been able to provide nothing but the greatest pleasures through and through. Although as we look through the films that have come to define 2018 as a whole, there were many surprises that came along the way just as there were disappointments – all of which came in between the very best and the worst in cinema through the year. So without further ado, let us begin. Continue reading →

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by Jaime Rebanal

Cold War Review: A Broken Romance Whose Happiness Evokes Sadness

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The moment one goes on stage, there’s one face that stands out inside a large crowd that sticks with you. It’s the presence of that one face that either gives you an intense feeling of stage fright, because you know you want to make sure everything goes absolutely right from start to finish – and it can be anyone. It can go from being someone who secretly envies your talent, or someone you’re in love with – and the very feeling that Paweł Pawlikowski shows that pressure to be only under your skin. Yet I saw something else in Cold War that also made it stand out – because every second of it was too beautiful to that degree I could not ever bear to relive such memories again, although I stick around watching it because I know that this is going to forever be a part of the sort of person that I am. But sometimes it doesn’t always have to be yourself that experiences what these memories can do to you, as you sit there and let everything come back inside your mind. When I watched Cold War, I kept something else in my head, something that I know would only be set to sting me more and more. I remembered what it felt like to be separated by those boundaries, no matter the extent we are kept apart. But that mutual tie came so clear in another dedication to the fact we loved what we did to make ourselves happy.

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by Jaime Rebanal

The 91st Academy Awards: Comments and Concerns

It has been an absolutely astonishing year for the cinema. But for as amazing a year as 2018 had been, we’re also left with facing one of the most insulting awards seasons to have come by in recent memory. You’d think that given last year’s set of nominees they actually would have been growing progressively better, especially having given a film like Moonlight the top honour for the 2016 ceremony (and a well-deserved one at that), but after the Golden Globes came by, I was already worried that we’d already be in store for one of the absolute worst in recent memory. To think that the Oscars would already have gone far beyond that “popular film” award in order to try and raise their viewership, as if the ceremonies themselves haven’t already been stale enough (i.e. overlong montages praising the industry and shallow activism that amounts to nothing), who knew that we’d be in store for one that was so out of touch – particularly in last year’s amazingly bad timing (with it being only barely ahead of the Olympics rather than in February like they usually were)? As a supposed celebration for the cinema comes by within the year, there are many things here to be concerned about.

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