Category: Film Festival

TIFF19 REVIEW: Ema [2019]

Jared Mobarak

You’ll forget all this. There’s a lot to unpack in Pablo Larraín‘s dance film Ema. From two lead characters as unreliable to the plot as they are fickle with each other to an elaborate scheme preying on the weaknesses of man and the pleasures of flesh, it’s tough to know what the director wants us to laugh at: the wildly unorthodox situations he’s created or the sociopathic characters within. I think his hope is the former as his talk after the screening heard him admitting he didn’t like the reggaetón…

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TIFF19 REVIEW: Synchronic [2020]

Jared Mobarak

The present is a miracle. When two paramedic best friends in New Orleans discovered the first unexplainable injury on their route, they didn’t really think much about it. The second? Well, it was a body. They shouldn’t have even been called. What about the third, though? A snake bite in a hotel room without a snake alongside a disappeared boyfriend? That’s when you start looking for the connective tissue holding everything together besides Steve (Anthony Mackie) and Dennis (Jamie Dornan) having the bad luck to catch them all. That’s when…

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TIFF19 REVIEW: The Giant [2020]

Jared Mobarak

You can’t run from where we’ve been. Places, objects, sounds, and smells each retain shimmers of memory we long to hold and struggle to forget. This is what’s happened to Charlotte’s (Odessa Young) childhood home—the place where her mother took her own life. Whether she hasn’t thought of it in a long time or it’s all she ever thinks about, this moment right now sees it taking control of her senses and refusing to let go. The lights in these nightmares extend out in a hazy blur, everything so much…

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TIFF19 REVIEW: How to Build a Girl [2020]

Jared Mobarak

This bitch be paying rent. As a young girl with aspirations to write, journalist Caitlin Moran used her hippie homeschool upbringing to enter literary competitions with potential to open industry doors. The Observer‘s “Young Reporter of the Year” at fifteen eventually started her professional career the following year with Melody Maker and never looked back. Did she devolve into the nom de plume Dolly Wild to gleefully trash bands as DM&E‘s resident rock gatekeeper extraordinaire? No. But you have to imagine the opportunity to go that route was available. The…

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TIFF19 REVIEW: The Lighthouse [2019]

Jared Mobarak

Bad luck to kill a seabird. You can stop yourself from worrying about story the moment you sit down for Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse since there is none—at least none of value besides the simple premise of two men isolated on a foggy island with nothing but their wits (and nightmares) about them. Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) is the seasoned veteran and thus the man-in-charge of assigning tasks. That process is simple too: he gets to man the light from evening to morning while his latest compatriot Ephraim Winslow (Robert…

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TIFF19 REVIEW: Sea Fever [2019]

Jared Mobarak

Don’t think. Just jump. Ever the scientist too enthralled with work to bother making friends, Siobhán (Hermoine Corfield) will stop at nothing to gaze upon a school of fish whose swim pattern might be crucial to her research. This means bumming onto a trawler owned by Gerard (Dougray Scott) and Freya (Connie Nielsen) thanks to an acquaintance with a crush (Jack Hickey). The fishing couple are short on cash (late payroll the reason Ardalan Esmaili‘s engineer Ahmed is about to quit), so they take her money, agree to one scuba…

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TIFF19 REVIEW: Sound of Metal [2020]

Jared Mobarak

Will it come back? The film opens with Riz Ahmed‘s Ruben sitting at a drum kit while guitar distortions deafen us. Eventually Olivia Cooke‘s Lou starts screaming as his sticks connect for a steady beat until all hell breaks loose. We’re in this venue with them, the in-close camerawork proving Ahmed’s lessons paid off because he is in a groove and rocking out (not that he needed help on the second part considering his rap career as Riz MC and one half of Swet Shop Boys). With line drawn tattoos…

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TIFF19 REVIEW: Blackbird [2020]

Jared Mobarak

To wonderful life. It’s not everyday that an international remake retains the same screenwriter, but that’s the case with Christian Torpe and his script for the Danish film Silent Heart moving to director Roger Michell‘s hands as Blackbird. I haven’t seen the original, but the subject’s universality has me thinking very little besides cultural changes were necessary in the translation. Assisted suicide is a hot-button issue in many countries and a family’s ability to get on-board a member’s decision to go through with one is tough no matter where they…

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TIFF19 REVIEW: Castle in the Ground [2019]

Jared Mobarak

I’m not stuck here with you. An addict is an addict whether they’ve become one via doctor’s orders or not. Sometimes the “not” part is even a direct result of those orders. When you’re working with volatile drugs like OxyContin, the line separating too much and not enough is razor-thin with the inclination being to err on the side of numb. We’re talking pain management after all and the more we take, the more tolerance we build to make the cycle worse. And for someone with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, it can…

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TIFF19 REVIEW: The Personal History of David Copperfield [2020]

Jared Mobarak

Digs for joy, that boy. Finds it too. David Copperfield (Dev Patel) has a story to tell. It begins with his cute, precocious little self (Jairaj Varsani) making Mom laugh and nanny Mrs. Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper) laugh even harder. He’s a headstrong boy with dreams of joy thanks to the overflowing love shown to him by everyone but his aunt (Tilda Swinton‘s Betsey Trotwood) … for now. Like most widowed women of thirty with an estate in the Victorian Era, however, remarrying is a foregone conclusion for Ms. Copperfield.…

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TIFF19 REVIEW: Mientras dure la guerra [While at War] [2019]

Jared Mobarak

But we’re Christians. Director Alejandro Amenábar spoke very briefly before the screening of his latest film Mientras dure la guerra [While at War] and the main sentiment was this: “It could happen anywhere.” He doesn’t, however, just mean rebellion or uprising. He doesn’t mean a coup or military dictatorship either. What he and co-writer Alejandro Hernández share via the parallel journeys of Don Miguel de Unamuno (Karra Elejalde) and General Franco (Santi Prego) is that just fights always run the risk of becoming unjust very fast. This truth is ultimately…

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