Day: September 9, 2012

TIFF12 REVIEW: The Impossible [2012]

Jared Mobarak

“Maybe tomorrow” Making a film about a tragedy like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami should never be taken lightly. With over 230,000 people dead in fourteen countries, the entire world was affected by this devastating event made worse due to its untimely December 26th date. An attempt to convey the emotions, pain, and hope hidden within could easily fall into manipulative territory, missing the point to become an exploitative moneymaking endeavor. So, it was with a skeptical soul that I went to the World Premiere at the Toronto International Film…

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TIFF11 INTERVIEW: Annemarie Jacir, writer/director of When I Saw You

Jared Mobarak

While at the Toronto International Film Festival I had the pleasure of sitting down for a chat with Palestinian-born writer/director Annemarie Jacir about her sophomore effort When I Saw You. With the World Premiere a mere hour away, one could see the excitement and passion she had for the film and the North American stage it would be debuting on. Already with a Foreign Language Oscar selection from her native country for 2008’s Salt of This Sea, it wouldn’t be surprising to see this new film meeting the same fate.…

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TIFF12 REVIEW: Passion [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“Why don’t we kiss and make up?” Five years after his last foray behind the camera, writer/director Brian De Palma looks to take some of the alternative devices used to film Redacted and combine them with the sexual thriller genre to which he is so indelibly aligned. A remake of the 2010 French film Love Crime, the auteur brings Natalie Carter and Alain Corneau‘s tale to Germany and lets its cutthroat female executives have at it. Beginning as a congenial work relationship, our central duo’s dynamic quickly spills into their…

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TIFF12 REVIEW: The Company You Keep [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“We made mistakes, but we were right” In Robert Redford and Lem Dobbs‘ adaptation of Neil Gordon‘s novel The Company You Keep, the personal futures fought for by the militant Weather Underground during the Vietnam War risk being destroyed as the last surviving members of a Bank of Michigan robbery find their past catching up to them after thirty years. Hidden with new identities and normal, domestic lives far from the bombings and murders of a previous era, they’ve begun to take stock and find the guilt of what they…

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TIFF12 REVIEW: Silver Linings Playbook [2012]

Jared Mobarak

“Is that song really playing?” I know it’s misguided, but my interest in David O. Russell films kind of ended after The Fighter. This was a guy who used to pave his own path with challenging material and comedies that made you think. It’s not even that I disliked his true-life boxing tale—actually I loved it. But where was the eccentricity? Where was the promise of subversive insanity that his sadly unfinished Nailed possessed? He showed he had the skills for the big time and I’m ecstatic he now has…

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