Jonathan Whitesell | www.jaredmobarak.com

TIFF22 REVIEW: Bones of Crows [2023]

2022/08/312022/11/26 Jared Mobarak

See you soon. It starts in the 1800s. That’s when the first residential schools were opened in Canada as a means of “beating the Indian” out of indigenous children throughout the country. The front-facing narrative was always education, but the thousands of bodies found in unmarked graves and devastating psychological toll endured by survivors of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse prove otherwise. And while writer/director Marie Clements never shies away from showing that generational trauma as it pertains to Aline Spears and her extended family, she’s also unafraid to depict…

REVIEW: Never Steady, Never Still [2018]

2018/06/192020/04/06 Jared Mobarak

I’m full of memories. I’m full of hope. I’m full of regrets. With a riveting central performance by Shirley Henderson as a woman dealing with advanced Parkinson’s, you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking Kathleen Hepburn‘s Never Steady, Never Still (adapted from her short of the same name) was simply about the tragedy of the disease. A different version of this story would probably go that route because it’s the “flashier” path towards recognition. The Vancouver native, however, decides to go further by delving beneath the surface by exposing the hardships…

REVIEW: The Unspoken [2016]

2016/10/242016/10/25 Jared Mobarak

“I repeat. Suspect present.” There are only so many iterations of the haunted house trope and yet they continue getting made. Sometimes we’re lucky with James Wan‘s The Conjuring series delivering fear along with period aesthetic and tense mood, but those are few and far between. More often we receive work trying hard to stand out from the pack that prove less than inspired with the past decade or so seeing an uptick in violence and gore to make up for any redundancies in themes. To that end I commend…