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REVIEW: Hannah [2018]

2018/02/222020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

He’s not coming. To see the titular character (Charlotte Rampling) at the start of Andrea Pallaoro‘s Hannah is to see someone like any other. She rides public transportation to her eccentric acting class, cooks dinner, and enjoys a quiet evening beside her spouse. The film’s start is ostensibly a silent one with only the noises of her journey and the sounds of her teacher permeating the calm serenity of a life lived in routine. We think nothing of it. I personal wondered where things would go. I knew Hannah’s story…

REVIEW: November [2017]

2018/02/182020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

The two of you with your frozen souls. What is the point of having a soul if everyone around you doesn’t? I think that’s the central question asked by Rainer Sarnet‘s November, a bleakly told Estonian fairy tale tragedy adapted from Andrus Kivirähk‘s novel Rehepapp. At its core is romance—the kind based in unrequited love that will never bear fruit. Liina (Rea Lest) is a peasant girl trying to catch Hans’ (Jörgen Liik) eye while his sights are affixed well above his social stature upon the German Baron’s (Dieter Laser)…

REVIEW: La passion de Jeanne d’Arc [The Passion of Joan of Arc] [1928]

2018/02/162020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

His ways are not our ways. The history of Carl Theodor Dreyer‘s masterwork La passion de Jeanne d’Arc [The Passion of Joan of Arc] is almost too perfectly attuned to the subject matter itself. Here was a renowned director hired to craft a movie about France’s most famous Catholic despite being neither French nor Catholic. Dreyer became a sort of pariah, helpless as the Archbishop of Paris and government officials demanded edits out of his control. His original cut then burned in a studio fire before a second created with…

BERLINALE18 REVIEW: Les rois mongols [Cross My Heart] [2018]

2018/02/142020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

They’re good guys doing bad things. While you can debate the success of politically motivated events like 1970’s October Crisis in Quebec, Canada, you can’t question their danger removed from the cause. The media reports the carnage whether terrorist bombings or kidnappings and murder. They provide an objective account of what’s happening—in this case the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) wreaking havoc to force secession from the country and become an autonomous nation—and leave it to their viewers to understand the context. Adults can handle this because many already…

BERLINALE18 REVIEW: Cobain [2018]

2018/02/112020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

My little man. There’s a scene in Nanouk Leopold‘s Cobain where the titular fifteen year-old (Bas Keizer) tells his estranged, junkie mother Mia (Naomi Velissariou) that he wants to help. Her response is to ask whether she cares about what he does, the answer tragically understood before his mouth utters the word “No.” To watch her shrug her shoulders and say, “Why should you?” epitomizes love’s power and its strength in circumstances where you couldn’t be blamed for believing it didn’t exist at all. Mia has never been a mother…

REVIEW: Watu Wote [All of Us] [2017]

2018/02/052020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

You’ll have to kill us all. It’s dispiriting to constantly watch as Muslims are forced to defend themselves against the bigotry of Catholics who blindly reject their entire religion as one synonymous with terrorism. Looking back upon history (and the present) to see the horrors committed by Christians under the guise of “acts of God” highlights the hypocrisy and ultimately the racism at its back. They label other human beings evil for doing exactly what they have done for centuries. They champion immigration bans, quote inaccurate statistics, and sit back…

REVIEW: Ava [2017]

2018/01/192020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

They won’t spoil our summer. Knowing your sight will leave you prematurely is a tough pill to swallow. Being told at age thirteen that the process had sped up to the point where all night vision would be gone by summer’s end is nothing short of devastating. Unfortunately this is the news Ava (Noée Abita) must cope with as vacation begins. It’s a sobering reality she confronts with steely resolve as her mother Maud (Laure Calamy) cries on the car ride home. The hope, however, is that these next few…

REVIEW: The Road Movie [2018]

2018/01/052020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

“Did we record?” I’d like to know the regulations for automobile tires in Russia because Dmitrii Kalashnikov‘s dash-cam compilation documentary The Road Movie has too many violent fishtails and gravity-enforced overturns to not have its audience infer the country as being riddled with bald tires. Some incidents occur in snowy conditions, but others don’t. Speed surely plays a factor alongside a weirdly calm yet psychotic form of road rage too, but the numbers are still too high to ignore. He probably could have filled the entire 67-minute runtime with these…

REVIEW: アンチポルノ [Anchiporuno] [Antiporno] [2017]

2018/01/032020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

Go on without me. Escape while you’re young because the longer you wait the more trapped you become. In this way we’re all lizards encased in glass bottles—a motif that runs throughout Sion Sono‘sアンチポルノ [Anchiporuno] [Antiporno], the director’s entry into Nikkatsu’s “Roman Porno” reboot forty years after giving birth to the genre. It’s during adolescence that we’re told how to act, cultural rules—no matter how archaic—gradually ingrained until they become truths we cannot combat because we don’t realize we should. Eventually we reach a point where learning ceases and being…

REVIEW: 120 battements par minute [BPM (Beats per Minute)] [2017]

2017/12/232020/04/17 Jared Mobarak

You can’t split responsibility. At one point during Robin Campillo‘s 120 battements par minute [BPM (Beats per Minute)] a high school girl tells a group of ACT UP Paris members that she doesn’t have to worry about AIDS because she’s not gay. It’s a horrific glimpse at the unconscionable lack of information sexually active teenagers were provided at the height of the disease epidemic during the early 1990s. To see her confident incredulity is to see the danger of ignorance and the importance of self-made, self-educated, and unfortunately mainly HIV-positive…

REVIEW: Una Mujer Fantástica [A Fantastic Woman] [2017]

2017/12/222020/04/17 Jared Mobarak

You didn’t have to treat me like a criminal. One of the worst experiences we endure is the loss of a loved one. It’s inevitable and yet no amount of preparation can truly soften the blow when it occurs. And it will occur more than once as parents, friends, spouses, and children grow within a world mired by disease, war, and fate. The sole comfort many take from these moments is the knowledge that they’ll be able to say goodbye and find closure as a means towards moving on. Dealing…