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TIFF REVIEW: Giant Little Ones [2019]

2018/09/092020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

Why did you tell her anything? Writer/director Keith Behrman knows exactly what he’s doing when introducing a variety of people along the sexuality spectrum in his latest film Giant Little Ones. He’s intentionally flooding his canvas so that we have no choice but to accept them all rather than turn our focus onto just one. There’s no room for token characters anymore, the real-life disparity between heterosexuals and homosexuals closing as each year passes. So Behrman looks to represent that change on the big screen by giving his lead (Josh…

TIFF REVIEW: Life Itself [2018]

2018/09/092020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

Tell them I’m nice. Morbid or not: I love when stationary characters turn to the camera only to be hit by a vehicle coming from offscreen. There’s something that’s just immensely satisfying about watching one step into that sweet spot of quiet, empty space with a hindered view on either side. I brace for impact, disappointed when it doesn’t arrive because the blocking so perfectly sets up tragedy despite the filmmaker’s decision to squander the opportunity. So I of course smiled when the first such collision occurs during Dan Fogelman‘s…

TIFF REVIEW: Skin [2019]

2018/09/092020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

This is what I have. Bryon ‘Babs’ Widner (Jamie Bell) hears the buzz of a faulty electrical connection, triggering a transition to an operating table and screams as the tattoos covering most of his body start being removed. It’s a soundscape that’ll have you squirming in your seat, the close-up shots of scar tissue replacing ink as physical a transformation as the act is metaphorical. Because the art adorning his face, neck, and torso isn’t some elaborate supernatural fantasy with family memorials—it’s a map to the blackest center of his…

TIFF REVIEW: The Lie [2019]

2018/09/082020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

We’re not turning around. All kids grow up. Some parents grow apart. And the ramifications of this combination can have drastic effects. Jealousies might crop up to cause rifts while nostalgia for times long since past try replacing a present of anger and regret. So what is there to do but deal with the pain? When the parents’ relationship devolves into acrimony, the child sees it. He/she will feel it in every fiber of his/her being. Maybe they act out in response to escape the position of diplomatic go-between keeping…

TIFF REVIEW: Teen Spirit [2019]

2018/09/082020/04/02 Jared Mobarak

Love’s not real. If you haven’t had enough underdog tales about kids from the wrong side of the tracks trying to make it big, Max Minghella‘s directorial debut Teen Spirit hits all the usual check marks to provide a stylish if familiar entry to the theme. There’s the likeable teen lead in Violet’s (Elle Fanning) Polish-British, Isle of Wight resident working her land and a waitress job all while attending school. The tough parent trying to instill a pragmatic realism meant to temper expectations that end up working to destroy…

TIFF REVIEW: White Boy Rick [2018]

2018/09/082020/04/02 Jared Mobarak

We’re goddamn lions. The pitch is as follows: Ricky Wershe Jr. (newcomer Richie Merritt) was a street hustler, drug kingpin, and FBI informant by the age of seventeen. If that doesn’t hook you, the added bonus of it all being real should. Welcome to White Boy Rick, a look at the American Dream that cuts through the bullshit to show what the term truly means outside of false promises. Ricky isn’t some hotshot who worked through the ranks and got too close to the sun. The order of those labels…

TIFF REVIEW: Beautiful Boy [2018]

2018/09/082020/04/02 Jared Mobarak

Everything. There’s an odd framing device within Felix Van Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy that strangely frames the first half of the film for no reason. It’s a scene wherein David Sheff (Steve Carell) is conducting an interview with a Dr. Brown (Timothy Hutton). The latter assumes it’s for a story considering the former is a journalist, but this inquiry is in fact a personal issue. Sheff is worried about his son Nic (Timothée Chalamet), a crystal meth addict who’s disappeared. He wants to get a better handle on the physical destructiveness…

TIFF REVIEW: Duelles [Mothers’ Instinct] [2019]

2018/09/072020/04/02 Jared Mobarak

Forgive me. Director Olivier Masset-Depasse lets us know exactly what to expect out of Duelles [Mothers’ Instinct] from the start, introducing an idyllic bourgeois home with all the sensory cues to foreshadow melodramatic suspense. Alice Brunelle (Veerle Baetens) peers out her window as neighbor Céline Geniot (Anne Coesens) leaves, rushing out once the car pulls away. She enters the woman’s adjoining home with a set of keys to clandestinely move through and close the curtains. We assume the worst: an affair. The music manipulates this suspenseful thought, the camera in-close…

TIFF REVIEW: کفرناحوم [Capharnaüm] [Capernaum] [2018]

2018/09/072020/04/02 Jared Mobarak

Because I was born. The synopsis doesn’t lie. Young Zain (Zain Al Rafeea) is in prison, his five-year sentence just put into effect. He has no papers despite being born in Lebanon and thus a doctor must estimate his age by his lack of baby teeth as twelve. But here he is anyway for a crime his mother dismisses as “childish,” a label the judge scoffs at considering the term’s length. It’s no wonder then that Zain has called this latest trial to sue his parents for neglect. Worse than…

TIFF REVIEW: The Front Runner [2018]

2018/09/072020/04/02 Jared Mobarak

A lot can happen in three weeks. And so it began—sentiments that prove true only until the next example replaces it. We’re just two years removed from Donald Trump’s victory for president of the United States and already the art seeking answers about what went wrong and what went right have arrived. Much of it stems from finding a turning point to mark when the mainstream media started including tabloid fodder under the header of journalism, when politics shifted from the good of constituents and country to that of party…

TIFF REVIEW: The Predator [2018]

2018/09/072020/04/02 Jared Mobarak

Did I say that out loud? Writer Shane Black had a good year in 1987. He burst onto the action screenwriting scene with Lethal Weapon. Co-wrote the cult classic children versus Universal monsters fantasy The Monster Squad with Fred Dekker. And landed a supporting role in the Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring Predator as an exfil team member unwittingly embroiled in a fight against an alien hunter of unfathomable power. It’s therefore only fitting that he’d reunite with Dekker three decades later to direct a new installment in the latter’s oft-returned to franchise.…

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