Tag: Jeremy Gardner

REVIEW: Offseason [2022]

Jared Mobarak

Wherever I went, there they were. When your dementia-riddled mother starts screaming about nightmares following her and demons crawling out from the water, it doesn’t matter how lucid she appeared to be beforehand. You tell her what she wants to hear, try to make her as calm and comfortable as possible, and wait for the inevitable. That’s what Marie Aldrich (Jocelin Donahue) did when Ava’s (Melora Walters) clear eyes and confident voice spun an outlandish tale surrounding the isolated island where she grew up and left without ever going back.…

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REVIEW: Like Me [2018]

Jared Mobarak

Tell me a story. While it may do a better job at depicting the nihilistic depravity of living through social media at the detriment of “real life” than Ingrid Goes West, Robert Mockler‘s Like Me still fails to capture the psychological prison this artificial life creates beyond its surface chaos. We watch Kiya (Addison Timlin) with a voyeuristic relish much like the viewers of her YouTube page—craving insanity as though it’s all an act because it very well could be exactly that. What we watch online isn’t inherently “real.” There…

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REVIEW: Psychopaths [2017]

Jared Mobarak

Evil’s a straight and simple ‘just because’. It’s hard to reject a film as having no substance when its narrator apologizes for that very fact. Was its hollowness therefore an intentional commentary on the empty nihilistic void that we call life or was the filmmaker throwing us for a “meta” loop with a tongue-in-cheek laugh that knowingly commends our having sat through it in its entirety nonetheless? In this vein Mickey Keating‘s Psychopaths could be profound or worthless. It could be a full-fledged movie that seeks to entertain in its…

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TIFF14 REVIEW: Spring [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“I’m not drunk enough to sleep in your mother’s deathbed” The first words in Colin Geddes’ TIFF description for Vanguard selection Spring are, “Before Sunrise gets a supernatural twist.” You read that as a cinephile and you push everything aside to check out what it could mean. A horror romance co-director Aaron Moorhead described in his and Justin Benson’s (who also wrote the screenplay) introduction as “life, love, and monsters”, its Italy-set journey of an American lost and alone proves equally suspenseful, grotesque, funny, and beautiful. The best part, however,…

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REVIEW: The Battery [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“Like rain on a tin roof” It’s hard to give any new film about zombies the benefit of the doubt. What started as a politically charged venue to comment on society has pretty much been warped into an entertainment franchise providing viewers copious amounts of guilt-free blood and gore in the name of survival. Every once in a while something fresh arrives—a comedic romp like Shaun of the Dead, the small screen writing clinic of “The Walking Dead”, enhanced mythology for more authentic thrills a la 28 Days Later, or…

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