Tag / sean penn

by Jaime Rebanal

‘Licorice Pizza’ Review: Tomorrow May Not be the Day According to Paul Thomas Anderson

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Over the years, Paul Thomas Anderson has made a name for himself as one of the best American filmmakers working today, with films like There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread, and The Master all under his belt within recent memory. With Licorice Pizza, Anderson finds himself returning to familiar territory as he brings audiences a coming-of-age comedy set within an era of Los Angeles that he grew up within. Perhaps the labelling of a “nostalgic love letter” to the 1970’s would be the first way of describing the concept of a movie all about growing up in this era of Los Angeles, but the picture being painted here is a much darker and more brilliant one than what meets the eye.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Finding Peace Through Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life: A Review

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Something about watching the films of Terrence Malick always puts me into a trance-like state, beyond the beautiful imagery present in his work to the philosophical outlook his films present on American life – with these qualities being most distinctive in his body of work, but The Tree of Life has always been another case scenario for myself. It clearly rings on all count that this is Terrence Malick at his most personal and also at some of his most thoughtful. It’s not unfamiliar for Terrence Malick to retain such traits all throughout his filmography for even those small traces were present in his early films but The Tree of Life presents yet another case scenario because it feels like everything that Malick had so subtly been building up in his filmography had finally found its own place here. You would only be repeating what is obvious if you were to say that The Tree of Life is a beautiful film because such imagery isn’t unfamiliar to the work of Terrence Malick, but here it creates a whole new aura – one that builds up to something of a greater scope. And the more it goes on, the more it keeps building – and the results are extraordinary.

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by Jaime Rebanal

The Last Face – Review

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Wasting talent is one thing, but associating all of that with something nearly half as unforgivable as The Last Face is a whole other level. Sean Penn’s first directorial effort after Into the Wild has found the actor-director sinking himself down to a new low, maybe even the lowest that he’s hit in his entire career. And somehow, the word “exploitative” isn’t even enough to describe what’s wrong with The Last Face on just about every level because even an element that would make itself to appear as slightly redeeming irrelevant when discussing the product as a whole. It’s been a long while since I’ve come across something of such a rare sort of ugliness on a screen of any sort – and I’ll be amazed if I find anything else of this kind come out within this year. Penn is clearly a wonderfully talented actor and maybe his directing isn’t on the same level, but this sort of thing is just baffling for someone of his own kind.

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by Jaime Rebanal

The Thin Red Line – Review

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Terrence Malick breaks a twenty year hiatus by presenting audiences with The Thin Red Line, a poem set during WWII beautifully detailing the humanity of the soldiers from C Company and their trial amidst the Battle of Mount Austen. Where The Thin Red Line becomes a truly special film to experience arises from how it is no ordinary Hollywood war film, but in some manner, a universal tale that in the end creates a beautiful resonance within one’s mind. At near three hours, Terrence Malick takes his audiences on a journey amidst the lunacy that would be present within the war and in the end, an easy contender for the best WWII film of all time. It may not be my favourite of the sort, but when talking about such, it certainly is not a film that I would leave out. Continue reading →