Tag / zazie beetz

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

‘Joker’ TIFF Review: Joaquin Phoenix Highlights This Terrifying Yet Flawed Supervillain Origin Story

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Todd Phillips’s origin story for Batman’s famous archenemy has already been called many things, from being a deranged film all about everything that can push a man too far to a dangerous film that would do more harm than good purely from the reputation of its lead character alone. Yet unlike most other comic book-based films of its era, it’s also unique on the count that it’s played at the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion at the former. But given the sort of character that the Joker was known to be among moviegoers of all sorts and those who have closely followed the comics, it was always set to be difficult to try and explore how he had come to be for he was simply known to be a character that always enjoyed violence for the fun of it. Yet knowing that writer-director Todd Phillips never took any direct inspiration from the comics when crafting a story of how he had come to be, seeing how he would experiment around a character of this sort was set to be quite the ride – and it turns out rather worthwhile too.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Deadpool 2 is What You’d Expect It To Be: A Review

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The first Deadpool film was fun when I saw it in theaters but upon further thought I’d only come to dislike it because the most it really presented itself to be was merely a typical superhero origin story posing as different through its meta humour only giving it a feeling of smugness that only became irritating as it went on. Having this mixed together with David Leitch, who had come fresh off John Wick and Atomic Blonde made me feel unsure because I also disliked the latter film so the idea of Leitch directing this only pushed me away from Deadpool 2. To say the least, my expectations already had given myself an idea of the audiences that I knew a Deadpool movie would have found itself appealing to but to my own surprise it didn’t get on my nerves nearly as much as the first film did and felt more like a nice step up. Despite qualms that echo what bothered me about the first Deadpool, it felt nice to see that not much of the cynicism that struck me from said film had lingered terribly in this one.

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