Tag: Vlad Ivanov

REVIEW: La Gomera [The Whistlers] [2019]

Jared Mobarak

The package arrived safely. A Romanian detective named Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) just landed on La Gomera in the Spanish Canary Islands. Because he’s unsure who’s supposed to meet him or where he’s going, he enters Kiko’s (Antonio Buíl) car with trepidation despite the man seemingly knowing everything about him. Only when they arrive at their destination to find Gilda (Catrinel Marlon) does Cristi relax since she’s the one who asked him to come and gave him the plane ticket. The reason is to teach him how to use an ancestral…

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REVIEW: Napszállta [Sunset] [2018]

Jared Mobarak

It’s starting all over again. I felt as though I was running circles throughout László Nemes‘ sophomore effort Napszállta [Sunset]. It doesn’t help that we’re often inches from Írisz Leiter’s (Juli Jakab) face—if not looking through her very eyes—as she winds her way through an unfamiliar and just out of focus Budapest, Hungary. I speak more of the narrative propulsion and metaphorical implications of the whole, though. Here’s a young woman stubbornly interjecting her way into the lives of strangers and yet constantly walking off to chase a clue about…

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REVIEW: Bacalaureat [Graduation] [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“Do what’s best for you” The amount of corruption to simply exist within the borders of Romania as displayed by Cristian Mungiu‘s Bacalaureat [Graduation] is insane. So much so that I feel bad admitting to what it reminded me of on a much more insidiously vile scale. Yes, it was nearly impossible not to see my hometown of Buffalo, New York as though looking in a mirror: the nepotism and the continuous promise of a future on the rise. It’s more than just Alexandra Davidescu‘s character talking about a reality…

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REVIEW: Poziţia copilului [Child’s Pose] [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“Why do you keep treating us like enemies?” What does it mean to be a parent? To take a blanketed, personal responsibility for the good and the bad of your child’s actions? This question is at the heart of Călin Peter Netzer‘s Golden Bear-winning (Berlin International Film Festival) film Poziţia copilului [Child’s Pose], not just the singular relationship of lead actress Luminița Gheorghiu‘s Cornelia Keneres and her grown son Bardu (Bogdan Dumitrache). There is that—her overbearing matriarch refusing to let her only child out of her clutches despite his trying…

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REVIEW: Le Concert [The Concert] [2009]

Jared Mobarak

“This is the real communism” By no means as madcap as I had been under the impression it would be, Radu Mihaileanu’s Le concert [The Concert] is most definitely the uplifting comedy it’s American poster proclaims. The laughs it elicits are often earned by scenes hiding truths, their revelations the joke, and absurd nonsense during the chaotic whirlwind of three days in Paris to ready for a sold out concerto featuring ‘The [Russian] Maestro’, famously embarrassed in a public assassination on stage thirty years previous, and the incomparable Anne-Marie Jacquet,…

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