Category: Suspense/Thriller

REVIEW: Midnight in the Switchgrass [2021]

Jared Mobarak

We all got excuses. I think Bruce Willis‘ agent needs a raise because they are going above and beyond to make sure their client gets A-list billing no matter what project he takes. I’d estimate the actor has about five total minutes of screen-time in Midnight in the Switchgrass—a majority of which is his FBI agent (Karl Helter) being a tired and soon-to-be retired mother hen for his much younger and more driven partner (Megan Fox‘s Rebecca Lombardo). It’s a cushy gig that probably put a few bucks in his…

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REVIEW: Great White [2021]

Jared Mobarak

We’ll get you there. There’s a legend of sorts about a shipwreck on the island locale most tourists ask Charlie (Aaron Jakubenko) and Kaz (Katrina Bowden) to take them off the Australian coast. Only one man survived the ordeal and natives, like the Captain’s cook (Te Kohe Tuhaka‘s Benny), have never forgotten his name. It therefore means something when the trio’s latest fares (Kimie Tsukakoshi‘s Michelle and Tim Kano‘s Joji) take out an urn of ashes and a photograph of that very same man. He was her grandfather and always…

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REVIEW: Pig [2021]

Jared Mobarak

Marge died ten years ago. Rob (Nicolas Cage) wants for nothing from his woodland lifestyle in the middle of Nowhere, Oregon. He has his cabin and his truffle hog: the former providing shelter, the latter companionship. With a whistle she comes trotting over, ready for another hunt. Sometimes it appears she’s the one finding culinary gold under the dirt and others it appears as though it’s him, troweling up some earth to taste. The duo knows what they’re doing and provide their buyer (Alex Wolff‘s Amir) a superior enough product…

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CANNES21 REVIEW: Are You Lonesome Tonight? [2021]

Jared Mobarak

Did you find him? Xue Ming (Eddie Peng) is in jail when we meet him. He’s talking about the boredom of living the same day repeatedly while thinking about how he got there. Deciding it’s better to show rather than tell, first-time director Shipei Wen sends us back to 1997 to find Xue on the telephone with an angry girlfriend just about fed up with waiting. It’s difficult to tell whether he’s on his way to the cinema late or simply going home when he finally leaves, but the path…

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REVIEW: Till Death [2021]

Jared Mobarak

It’s time to wake up. Emma (Megan Fox) arrives at her husband’s (Eoin Macken) law office ready for their anniversary dinner only to hear him say he prefers her red dress. Instead of thinking out loud, he’s stating a problem in need of rectifying. A “joke” that there’s time to stop home and change isn’t therefore a joke at all once we cut to the restaurant, see Emma in red, and begin to understand why the first scene of S.K. Dale‘s Till Death showed her in another man’s (Aml Ameen‘s…

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REVIEW: First Date [2021]

Jared Mobarak

Let’s talk turkey. Tony (Todd Goble) declaring his love over the phone to a woman he just met while hastily (and poorly) packing a suitcase in the hopes of getting out of Dodge before the people coming after him arrive with guns drawn is obviously going to impact what follows. His yet unknown pursuers will inevitably become Mike’s (Tyson Brown) inheritance being the lead in Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp‘s latest feature First Date, their band of criminals in search of something valuable enough to kill anyone that gets in…

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REVIEW: The Woman in the Window [2021]

Jared Mobarak

It’s not really therapy if there’s a knife at your back. No one seems to have been under any illusion that what they were making was in any way original. Director Joe Wright wouldn’t have his old movie lover lead character watching Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window in the opening scene if he did. Much like Disturbia, however, comparing one work to another because of similar basic premises is usually just a way of proving your inability to realize all art is pretty much an amalgam of references anyway. We champion…

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REVIEW: Infinite [2021]

Jared Mobarak

No one’s got time for destiny. The background of how Infinite was optioned is a fun, anecdotal tale steeped in what some might construe as fate while others simply dismiss it as dumb luck. Former software developer D. Eric Maikranz self-published his debut novel The Reincarnationist Papers in 2009—the fictional memoirs of a man with memories of past lives who seeks to join a secret society of others like him—with the promise (printed on the front page) to give anyone able to put a copy into the pipeline at a…

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REVIEW: La Dosis [The Dose] [2020]

Jared Mobarak

Important decisions are never easy to make. Despite being a film about euthanatizing ICU nurses at a provincial hospital in Argentina, Martín Kraut‘s directorial debut La Dosis [The Dose] actually begins with a miraculous attempt to bring a patient back to life after doctors had already declared her dead. That’s the kind of man Marcos (Carlos Portaluppi) is, though. On the job for two decades and counting, he knows when someone is beyond help and when their time has yet to arrive. He therefore grabs the paddles, shocks her two…

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REVIEW: Cruella [2021]

Jared Mobarak

There’s lots more bad things coming. I promise. First thing’s first when making a prequel to Dodie Smith‘s One Hundred and One Dalmatians that focuses villain Cruella de Vil as its antihero: ensure that audiences know she doesn’t hate dogs. Better yet, screenwriters Dana Fox and Tony McNamara go one further by making Estella (Emma Stone‘s proto-Cruella’s schizophrenic “good” persona) a lover of dogs. She saves one from the streets (Buddy) and adopts it as her best friend. She subsequently enlists another dog’s services (Wink) upon teaming up with the…

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REVIEW: Caveat [2021]

Jared Mobarak

There’s got to be more to it than that. Isaac (Jonathan French) doesn’t remember Barret (Ben Caplan), but Barret assures him they are friends. He even visited him at the hospital only to discover Isaac had no recollection of ever having met him before. I guess you have two choices when suffering from partial memory loss: you either decide to trust nobody or accept the help of strangers who say they aren’t strangers at all. Isaac is the latter … albeit skeptical. Whether that skepticism is towards Barret himself or…

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