Category: Toronto International Film Festival

INTERVIEW: Reinaldo Marcus Green, director of Good Joe Bell

Jared Mobarak

Between his feature film debut Monsters and Men in 2018 and the currently shooting Richard Williams (Venus and Serena’s father) biopic starring Will Smith, Reinaldo Marcus Green had the distinction of directing Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana‘s first produced screenplay since their Brokeback Mountain Oscar victory in 2006. That’s quite the run for the New York native, NYU Tisch graduate—one that has quickly proven to be very well deserved. Good Joe Bell is that sophomore title and it just debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival. It tells the tragic…

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TIFF20 REVIEW: Underplayed [2021]

Jared Mobarak

Talent is everywhere. Opportunity isn’t. Like every industry built under the watchful eye of a global patriarchy, the Electronic Dance Music (EDM) scene is grossly tilted in favor of its male artists. And like many of those same industries, this fact exists despite the presence of women pioneers at the inception of electronic sound as a medium. For every Robert Moog that acknowledged their genius (he enlisted Clara Rockmore’s expertise to better the advancement of his synthesizer), there were unfortunately countless others like Don Buchla (who agreed to sponsor a…

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TIFF20 REVIEW: The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel [2020]

Jared Mobarak

People, profit, and planet. Sixteen years after author Joel Bakan‘s book The Corporation was made into a feature length documentary by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, the time to revisit his thesis and see how the market adapted has arrived. Joining Abbott in the director’s chair himself for the follow-up, The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel looks to introduce viewers to what was probably the only logical progression for a for-profit corporation to take after achieving the rights of a human being under the court of law. Anyone who’s…

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TIFF20 REVIEW: Inconvenient Indian [2020]

Jared Mobarak

Once a story is told, it cannot be called back. As author Thomas King states near the end of Michelle Latimer‘s feature-length documentary inspired by his novel of the same name, Inconvenient Indian: “The problem has never been ignorance, but arrogance.” White, Christian colonialists can only say that their ancestors didn’t know any better so often before the words prove meaningless. Whether of not their actions towards the indigenous populations of North America were malicious in intent becomes inconsequential once the case for the pain and suffering wrought is made.…

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TIFF20 REVIEW: Violation [2020]

Jared Mobarak

Don’t! Stop! We’re often told growing up that every story has two sides so that we can learn how to put ourselves into another’s shoes and see whether actions we thought were harmless actually did cause harm. That doesn’t mean you can’t project the sentiments onto adult situations too, though. Especially when they deal with memory. Take Miriam (Madeleine Sims-Fewer) and Greta (Anna Maguire) for example—two sisters who used to do everything together in their youth. When the topic of teenage injustice first arrives in conversation, their anecdote is colored…

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TIFF20 REVIEW: Joe Bell [2021]

Jared Mobarak

The truth is all I have. The first event at which we see Joe Bell (Mark Wahlberg) speak his anti-bullying message can’t help but make you laugh. He’s standing on-stage with a disheveled look cultivated by a weeks-long journey on foot, spouting more nervous “ums” then concrete dialogue as his son Jadin (Reid Miller) watches at the back of the auditorium. The scene lasts less than two minutes before Bell asks the audience of teenagers if they have any questions as though his awkward presence was enough to spark conversation…

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TIFF20 REVIEW: Beans [2021]

Jared Mobarak

This is OUR road. There’s a big difference beyond adaptation and assimilation. One is additive. The other is subtractive. One deals in compromise with two sides adjusting their perspectives to create a mutual path forward. The other declares a status quo and works towards enforcing it through whatever oppressive means are necessary. To not understand the crucial conflict that exists between those terms is therefore very rarely a matter of ignorance. It’s instead the by-product of entitlement. To expect another human being to adapt to your idea of “normalcy” via…

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TIFF20 REVIEW: Akilla’s Escape [2020]

Jared Mobarak

The bigger you get, the less you touch. To be born a prince is sometimes to be born a slave. Your birthright becomes your fate and there can be no deviation from it. Your duty is as much a part of your identity as your name because it’s the filter through which everyone sees you. And that goes for good and ill—for kingdoms and cartels. It’s why a general in the Jamaican drug trade’s Garrison Army out of New York City (Ronnie Rowe‘s Clinton Brown) named his son Akilla (Thamela…

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TIFF20 REVIEW: Enemies of the State [2020]

Jared Mobarak

The truth doesn’t matter. Documentarian Sonia Kennebeck‘s feature debut National Bird focused on three whistleblowers speaking about the United States military’s use of drones in secret wars waged overseas. She gave those veterans a platform with which to tell their story and perhaps assuage some guilt while striving to find a hopeful path forward within a world plagued by technological warfare more akin to videogame detachment than seeing the “whites of an insurgent’s eyes.” So it makes sense that she’d also gravitate towards the wild conspiracies surrounding another whistleblower-adjacent figure…

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TIFF19 REVIEW: This is Not a Movie [2019]

Jared Mobarak

This is where the match was lit. The reason Yung Chang picked This is Not a Movie for the title of his documentary on renowned journalist Robert Fisk stems from his subject’s inspiration for pursuing that line of work. Fisk talks about watching Alfred Hitchcock‘s Foreign Correspondent as a boy and thinking its lead led a life of excitement that most people only ever dream about. So he pursued the career despite parents wishing for another direction (before their pride of having a son at The London Times kicked in)…

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TIFF19 REVIEW: Pelikanblut [Pelican Blood] [2020]

Jared Mobarak

I’m the lucky one. Writer/director Katrin Gebbe is not messing around with her latest film Pelikanblut [Pelican Blood]. What starts as a psychological drama about a mother desperate to provide her new daughter the love necessary to free her from the demons of a traumatic past gradually escalates into a supernatural thriller augmenting what science attempts to prove. So while the explanation of a piece of artwork depicting a pelican that pierced its chest to reanimate its dead children with its blood first appears as metaphor, it just might be…

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