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REVIEW: Allied [2016]

2016/11/222016/11/24 Jared Mobarak

“Look for the hummingbird” Sometimes that story you’ve had bouncing around your head needs time to gestate and your career the opportunity to blossom before it can be released upon the world. For Steven Knight it was a bit of both. Already nominated for an Oscar back in 2004 for the brilliant Dirty Pretty Things, the screenwriter soon wrote Eastern Promises before directing the intriguing one-man show Locke. A couple underrated gems (Pawn Sacrifice), some duds (Seventh Son), and a critically acclaimed television series later (“Peaky Blinders”), he finally put…

REVIEW: Rules Don’t Apply [2016]

2016/11/102016/11/11 Jared Mobarak

“You’re an exception” Eighteen years after Bulworth and fifteen after Town & Country (his last time directing and acting for a feature film respectively), Warren Beatty returns to the big screen with a fictionalized biography of Howard Hughes forty years in the making. It’s a passion project and vanity project: two endeavors worthy of an auspicious return to the spotlight even if the latter isn’t always the best decision for retaining a renowned legacy. Will Rules Don’t Apply taint peoples’ image of him? No. It’s not going to mark any…

REVIEW: 아가씨 [Ah-ga-ssi] [The Handmaiden] [2016]

2016/11/082016/11/16 Jared Mobarak

“The snake marks the bounds of knowledge” As soon as I began walking out of the theater after 아가씨 [Ah-ga-ssi] [The Handmaiden], a friend and fellow critic asked if I was the one laughing. I said, “Yes.” Parts Two and Three (of three) were legitimately funny—I’d say intentionally so. All of Chan-wook Park‘s films are out of necessity considering how dark, twisted, and violent his subject matter proves. I’d argue Korean cinema on the whole has an inherently unavoidable humor if only because the acting always seems to possess a…

REVIEW: L’ultimo bacio [The Last Kiss] [2001]

2016/10/172016/10/17 Jared Mobarak

“With pounds of cellulite and all your insecurities” I really want to love Gabriele Muccino‘s Italian blockbuster of a rom-com L’ultimo bacio [The Last Kiss] because it is funny, charming, complicated, and hopeful. My issue lies in the fact that it’s also awful in its depictions of selfish ego and weak indifference. Maybe this is a product of its European creation. Maybe extramarital affairs are commonplace enough in Italy to be able to laugh them off and accept them as a casualty of war, but I’d be lying if I…

REVIEW: Sam [2016]

2016/10/052016/10/10 Jared Mobarak

“I kinda like being the only guy in New York with a gynecologist” Even though Nicholas Brooks is about thirty years too late for his gender-swapping, chauvinistic rom-com Sam, he does end up successfully subverting expectations. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not a good movie. There are enough fades to black to make me drowsy and unaware of whether or not my eyelids were closing, the physical comedy feels like amateurs on stage at dinner theater, and the sexism—while intentionally broad for Brooks’ thesis—is so blatant that you have to…

REVIEW: 残菊物語 [Zangiku monogatari] [The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum] [1939]

2016/09/282016/09/29 Jared Mobarak

“Wait for me” Writer/director Kenji Mizoguchi‘s Meiji period-set film about a struggling Kabuki actor and his devoted wife, 残菊物語 [Zangiku monogatari] [The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum], is a heartbreaking display of love’s power to endure no matter the external forces trying to extinguish it. For Kikunosuke Onoue (Shôtarô Hanayagi), the adoptive child of master actor Kikugorô Onoue V (Gonjurô Kawarazaki), fame and fortune meant nothing after experiencing true friendship and affection from his baby brother’s nurse Otoku (Kakuko Mori). She told him the truth about his failings on stage,…

TIFF16 REVIEW: A United Kingdom [2016]

2016/09/112016/12/05 Jared Mobarak

“I’ve never wanted anything like I want this” Who knew the power of love ultimately won independence for the democratic republic of Botswana? I sure didn’t. But this is the based on a true story film writer Guy Hibbert and director Amma Asante have delivered with A United Kingdom. It’s a tale of racial segregation, politically driven cowardice, and the heart prevailing over fear as two kindred spirits choose to write their own destinies. Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike) couldn’t know the London-based missionary event her sister dragged her to would…

TIFF16 REVIEW: Tramps [2017]

2016/09/102017/05/01 Jared Mobarak

“Kids menu or appetizers?” The romantic comedy formula is one that can’t help but become redundant in premise. How many different scenarios are there for two people to converge? Even so, Adam Leon may have found a new one with his meet-cute during a dead-drop gone wrong called Tramps. It should have been a painless exchange: Ellie (Grace Van Patten) picks up Danny (Callum Turner), they retrieve a briefcase with unknown contents, and deliver said case to a woman with a green purse at the train station. She may have…

TIFF16 REVIEW: Souvenir [2016]

2016/09/082016/12/05 Jared Mobarak

“Like ABBA but not so famous” It starts with bubbles. So many bubbles rising slowly in liquid as the opening credits in script font flash onscreen. And when the camera finally pans out to see what it’s been that’s mesmerized us so? A glass of water with an Alka-Seltzer dropped in, of course. This is the humor director Bavo Defurne and his co-writers Jacques Boon and Yves Verbraeken infuse throughout their outside-the-box romance Souvenir. As it is the woman about to drink this concoction is hardly special: she lives alone,…

REVIEW: The Light Between Oceans [2016]

2016/08/292016/08/31 Jared Mobarak

“There’s always something to fix” Writer/director Derek Cianfrance isn’t done with cinematic tapestries of emotion quite yet as The Light Between Oceans fits his still burgeoning oeuvre perfectly. Based on M.L. Stedman‘s debut novel, the structure delivers a similar duality as both Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines before it. We spend so much time with lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) and his wife Isabel (Alicia Vikander) that it proves a jarring switch to suddenly shift towards heartbroken widow Hannah Roennfeldt (Rachel Weisz), especially knowing her place…

REVIEW: Captain Fantastic [2016]

2016/08/252016/08/26 Jared Mobarak

“Your mother is dead” When you look at the poster for Captain Fantastic—especially the bright red suit worn by Cash family patriarch Ben (Viggo Mortensen)—you can’t help conjure twee thoughts of Wes Anderson quirk and yet Matt Ross‘ sophomore feature is anything but. This film is instead rooted in a very strong sense of reality. Just because it may not be your reality doesn’t lessen the events occurring or decisions made. If anything they’re strengthened because you notice the choices your parents made and you’ve made as parents in this…