Tag: Mica Levi

REVIEW: The Fall [2019]

Jared Mobarak

Taking from his music video background of surreally nightmarish visions, director Jonathan Glazer delivered a surprise seven-minute short last year entitled The Fall. The description says it all: “a masked mob cruelly punish a lone masked man.” We see them shake the tree to which their victim clings tightly, pick him up off the forest floor, affix a noose around his neck, and let him descend through a seemingly never-ending pit beneath the gallows. The ordeal is off-putting in its lack of context and eerily disturbing in its use of…

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REVIEW: Monos [2019]

Jared Mobarak

The Organization is our family. A scene of kids having fun playing a game of blindfolded soccer at night turns into a day of boot camp with an unknown man (Wilson Salazar) berating them like a drill sergeant to run faster, look meaner, and stand straighter. These child soldiers are hiding high up in the Colombian mountains—passing time with automatic rifles at the ready while watching over a kidnapped woman (Julianne Nicholson‘s Doctora) held for reasons also unknown. Our assumption is political leverage because they put her in front of…

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REVIEW: Jackie [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“When something’s written down—does that make it true?” It’s rather intriguing how we feel we know our presidents. They represent us as a leader of the free world and we in turn love them enough to mourn their passing even when it’s decades after their run in the Oval Office ceased. But what is it that we really know? We only see what they allow. We see the aftermath of important moments—good and bad—but not the decisions themselves. Everything that we know without reading a book comes from what they’ve…

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REVIEW: Under the Skin [2014]

Jared Mobarak

**POSSIBLE SPOILERS** “Do you want to touch my neck?” Some movies require you to take a pause so they may settle into your consciousness and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those are generally the good ones. It could be because the story is abstract or opaque and needs deciphering. Or perhaps it took an unexpected twist from initial preconceptions or mid-viewing hypotheses and you must now reconcile its reality with failed assumptions. Jonathan Glazer‘s Under the Skin, however, surprised me due to something I did expect: its silent,…

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