Suspense/Thriller | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: The Neon Demon [2016]

2016/06/302016/07/01 Jared Mobarak

“Are you food or are you sex” Fame: all that’s glittered and gold, the intrinsic “it” quality we’d kill for but never do. That aura with an expiration date; beauty, confidence, radiance, and whatever other label outsiders use to transform you into a commodity to be bought, sold, and exploited within the tiny window before someone younger takes your place. This is Nicolas Winding Refn‘s The Neon Demon, an unexplainable concept jumping person to person without definition or discernment. It consumes the souls of unwitting vessels, makes them and breaks…

REVIEW: The Purge: Election Year [2016]

2016/06/282018/07/03 Jared Mobarak

“Is murder our new religion?” The escalation of terror has dialed up a few more notches as writer/director James DeMonaco takes us further down the hole of first world genocide in The Purge: Election Year. What began behind fortified walls and a false sense of modest superiority to show how no one was safe when bloodlust, greed, and jealousy ruled mankind soon entered the outdoors to find the government blatantly enforcing its own thinly veiled mantra of “kill the poor” when the public stopped doing it for them. The only…

REVIEW: The Shallows [2016]

2016/06/262016/06/27 Jared Mobarak

“The island of the pregnant woman” Not all shark movies should be compared to Jaws—not even The Shallows. If you were to make any type of correlation cinema-wise it should be Cast Away meets Gravity or All Is Lost. The idea here is to put a character in isolation during a survival moment where hope can be lost in an instant. Will he/she prevail? Will he/she give him/herself the opportunity to live? Most of us would give up as soon as that shark’s vice-grip tightened around our thigh. Kicking and…

REVIEW: Dark [2016]

2016/06/032016/06/03 Jared Mobarak

“I didn’t like what I saw” It’s summer 2003 and the entire Northeast is about to go Dark. I lost seeing Radiohead as a result of that blackout—my tickets for the weekend’s Toronto show postponed a few months later to an exam night the next semester. Some people had it better with nothing going awry besides losing some perishables in the fridge; other had it worse. How much worse is up to the people who experienced it or those like screenwriter Elias and director Nick Basile seeking to use that…

REVIEW: Careful What You Wish For [2016]

2016/06/022016/06/09 Jared Mobarak

“This guy looks like he’d hit a child” The real mystery is how Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum‘s Careful What You Wish For got itself a theatrical release in the first place—no matter how limited. I’m not surprised Starz Digital is handling distribution, though, since it feels exactly like a late night pay cable ticket sanitized to an R-rating for lustful eroticism rather than actual chemistry, nudity, or plausibility. Sometimes thrillers of the “youthful stalker hits the sexual jackpot” variety can at least be entertaining in an ironic way, but that’s unfortunately…

REVIEW: Approaching the Unknown [2016]

2016/05/302016/06/01 Jared Mobarak

“That planet is calling for us” While the mission is one thing, your reason for performing it could be drastically different. For Captain William Stanaforth (Mark Strong) the two barely overlap except for a common destination: Mars. He will be the first man to ever step foot on the Red Planet with another astronaut (Sanaa Lathan‘s Maddox) following closely behind his 270-day journey by about a month. He’s bringing a water generator he created that synthesizes the fluid from soil and she has supplies to ready future colonization. The endeavor…

REVIEW: Blue Velvet [1986]

2016/05/252021/02/28 Jared Mobarak

Now it’s dark After finding critical and commercial success with The Elephant Man—earning his first Oscar nominations for directing and screenplay—David Lynch became bankable enough to mount what would end up a large-scale disaster in Dune. Whereas many would probably count the latter as a failure across the board, the truth is that the sci-fi epic is much more attuned to the auteur’s sensibilities. Anyone who had seen his debut feature Eraserhead in all its strange surrealistic glory would concur, but by that time there were surely not many (and…

REVIEW: Money Monster [2016]

2016/05/132016/05/13 Jared Mobarak

“It’s time to throw some punches” The show must and will go on. This is the lesson Jodie Foster‘s latest thriller Money Monster provides above its suspense-fueled look into corporate greed and Wall Street’s seemingly Teflon-covered skin. I don’t know if it was written this way by Alan DiFiore, Jim Kouf, and Jamie Linden or if Foster put the more global arena spin of humanity’s craving for disaster on the other end of a television screen during the editing process, but you can’t help get slapped in the face by…

REVIEW: Sueñan los androides [Androids Dream] [2015]

2016/05/11 Jared Mobarak

“I see many tears” Back in 1962 author Philip K. Dick asked the question, “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” From there director Ridley Scott brought Blade Runner to life in 1982 and today we have Spaniard Ion De Sosa commenting on the query himself with Sueñan los androids [Androids Dream]. For him the answer to Dick’s question isn’t necessarily yes to the sheep part, but it is definitively a yes to the dreams. His futuristic androids roaming about a sterile 2052 Earth dream about assimilation and equality. They dream…

REVIEW: Cash Only [2016]

2016/05/102016/05/11 Jared Mobarak

“Albanian hell is cold” An arson insurance scam attempt gone tragically wrong leaves low-rent criminal Elvis Martini (Nickola Shreli) with little to hold onto besides his young daughter Lena (Ava Simony) in Cash Only. Unfortunately, he also has little to provide her despite two years having passed since the incident. Money woes mount as Albanian bookies who’ve given him the benefit of the doubt for too long seek what’s owed and the bank threatens to foreclose on his five-unit apartment complex—his only means of income (when his tenants pay). He…

REVIEW: Green Room [2016]

2016/05/052016/05/06 Jared Mobarak

“The energy doesn’t last” It’s official: Jeremy Saulnier‘s Blue Ruin was no fluke. That pulse-pounding thriller wowed audiences a couple years ago with good reason and his follow-up Green Room only advances that success further. It’s as though he looked upon the climax of his 2014 gem and wondered what it’d be like to mold that powder keg of suspense into a full-length feature. His latest puts his players in their predicament very early and watches as the victims try to escape and predators enter. The numbers are about even…