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TIFF22 REVIEW: Muru [2022]

2022/09/022022/09/12 Jared Mobarak

He’s chasing taniwha. New Zealand’s Tūhoe people have faced more than a century of aggression for daring to keep their culture alive. As relayed at the start of Tearepa Kahi‘s thriller Muru (a Māori word for their process of redressing transgressions), the facts are undeniable. In 1916, the police staged a raid to arrest Tūhoe prophet Rua Kenana on charges of sedition (he would later be acquitted and instead charged with resisting). A half-hour gunfight ensued leaving two dead and six wounded. Then the police staged another in 2007 to…

TIFF22 REVIEW: North of Normal [2023]

2022/09/022022/11/26 Jared Mobarak

Never give into fear. With an adolescence as singular as the one Cea Sunrise Person led, it would be strange if she didn’t write a memoir. Growing up in Yukon territory tipis. Squatting in strangers’ vacation homes with her mother’s revolving door of boyfriends. Suddenly being thrust into civilization as a teen outcast who looked at televisions as something otherworldly. Modeling—something her grandfather railed against as the epitome of everything wrong with the capitalistic society he left behind—becomes Person’s dream to finally build something of her own with the financial…

VENICE22 REVIEW: Aus meiner Haut [Skin Deep] [2023]

2022/09/012022/11/26 Jared Mobarak

What is this place? What makes a person? Mind or body? Take that line of inquiry even further and ask what it is you love about your significant other. Is it how they look or who they are? The combination of answers to these questions are infinite because we as people are too. Maybe looks or humor or generosity got you through the door, but those things can’t stop you from leaving alone. At some point you must dig deeper to discover it’s the indefinable essence beneath their skin and…

TIFF22 REVIEW: The Swearing Jar [2022]

2022/09/012022/09/12 Jared Mobarak

Context doesn’t count. Both Carey (Adelaide Clemens) and Simon (Patrick J. Adams) have news. Who should go first? Well, there’s a reason most people ask for the bad. Yes, they often want the good news to soften the blow rather than have it ruined by the bad, but what about the risk that doing it the other way around might cause the bad news never to be spoken? That’s what happens here. Who knows what might have been if Simon spoke first? Because he didn’t, though, Carey’s revelation that she’s…

TIFF22 REVIEW: Bones of Crows [2023]

2022/08/312022/11/26 Jared Mobarak

See you soon. It starts in the 1800s. That’s when the first residential schools were opened in Canada as a means of “beating the Indian” out of indigenous children throughout the country. The front-facing narrative was always education, but the thousands of bodies found in unmarked graves and devastating psychological toll endured by survivors of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse prove otherwise. And while writer/director Marie Clements never shies away from showing that generational trauma as it pertains to Aline Spears and her extended family, she’s also unafraid to depict…

VENICE22 REVIEW: Goliath [2022]

2022/08/292022/11/26 Jared Mobarak

I totally understand you. If a local village warlord discovers he’s in a movie titled Goliath, he better watch his back. It doesn’t matter what his origin story is—and Poshaev (Daniyar Alshinov) has a bloody one—since power is never absolute. Yes, the villagers hail him as a hero for using his formidable presence to extort jobs for the community at a foreign investment firm’s tungsten mine. Yes, he works to keep drugs out of his domain by ruthlessly gunning down any rival gangs who dare to bring it across his…

REVIEW: Breaking [2022]

2022/08/202022/08/24 Jared Mobarak

I have a bomb. To read Aaron Gell’s article about Brian Brown-Easley’s death from the military-centered publication Task & Purpose is to dive deep into the nuts and bolts of how a tragedy such as this occurred from systemic racism to the failure of organizations to help those it purports to help to mental illness and beyond. To watch Abi Damaris Corbin‘s cinematic depiction Breaking is to confront the incident’s emotional ramifications whether doing so manipulates the facts in the process or not. And that’s expected. Even if Corbin had…

REVIEW: The Legend of Molly Johnson [2022]

2022/08/152022/08/17 Jared Mobarak

Sing it in your sleep. A favorite of Leah Purcell‘s as a child, Henry Lawson’s short story “The Drover’s Wife” was always at the front of her mind upon growing into adulthood as an artist. It only makes sense then that she would take that tale from 1892 and reimagine it as an Australian western able to bring her own ancestral history as a fair-skinned Aboriginal woman into the light. First, she had to give the titular wife a name: Molly Johnson. Next, it was fleshing out a dramatic narrative…

REVIEW: The Immaculate Room [2022]

2022/08/142022/08/16 Jared Mobarak

What if he’s watching? On its surface, The Immaculate Room is a contest. A game. If you and your romantic partner can spend fifty days in a stark white room with nothing but a bed, minimalist couch-like ottoman, and bathroom that only allows one contestant at a time, you go home with five million dollars. It seems easy because it is … if you’re only looking at the surface. Peel back the layers of its conceit, however, and you see the potential for participants to go stir crazy with nothing…

REVIEW: Summering [2022]

2022/08/102022/08/10 Jared Mobarak

This is our body. It used to be that going to see the dead body was the adventure. Now we have a need to figure out why the body is dead. There’s probably something in this contrast that speaks to the evolutionary shift in technology, adolescent maturity, and genre envelope-pushing that occurred between Stand By Me in 1986 and Summering in 2022, but the latter isn’t necessarily interested in the differences as much as it is in pretending differences don’t exist. The world has changed while our children’s comprehension of…

REVIEW: 비상선언 [Bisang seoneon] [Emergency Declaration] [2022]

2022/08/062022/08/09 Jared Mobarak

We’ve become his guinea pigs. As described at the start of Jae-rim Han disaster film in the sky, everything is supposed to stop the moment a pilot initiates a Bisang seoneon [Emergency Declaration]. It alone lets everyone involved know that the plane is in real danger of crashing. Other aircraft are instantly diverted into circling patterns, the nearest runaway is cleared for landing, and it becomes all-hands-on-deck to ensure the safety of passengers and crew on-board. And the general populace condones those measures because they don’t know when they might…