Month: December 2018

REVIEW: Minding the Gap [2018]

Jared Mobarak

We formed a family together. It begins as a film about self-created community, three young men coming together on their skateboards to escape the private turmoil experienced at home. The sport was a cathartic outlet more than some bid to act cool, helping them become close enough friends to share details about their individual demons and discover how similar their pasts proved. Suddenly director Bing Liu—who we see cutting his cinematic chops with skating videos shot in the parks and on the streets of their Rockford, Illinois hometown—saw a chance…

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REVIEW: At Eternity’s Gate [2018]

Jared Mobarak

I am my paintings. Vincent Van Gogh is quite the enigmatic figure in the art world as a man whose genius was ahead of its time. His greatest works were painted in the final two years of his life while combatting multiple psychotic breaks and asylum stays. People called his art ugly and dismissed his style as crude, but now he’s revered as a Post-Impressionist who helped expand the possibilities of modern painting in the decades since. He infamously cut off his ear, wrote long letters, and ultimately committed suicide…

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REVIEW: Zimna wojna [Cold War] [2018]

Jared Mobarak

Time doesn’t matter when you are in love. It’s critical to know that writer/director Pawel Pawlikowski loosely based his main characters in Zimna wojna [Cold War] on their namesakes: his parents. To know he acknowledges the fact that they were destructive together and lovesick apart makes the way in which the fictional Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Joanna Kulig) interact easier to accept since they aren’t necessarily “good” people. They’re selfish, headstrong, and opportunistic. They constantly take via a consciously knowing means of manipulation and grow frustrated when things don’t…

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REVIEW: L’empire de la perfection [John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection] [2018]

Jared Mobarak

Indeed, it seems he’s playing himself. Titled L’empire de la perfection [In the Realm of Perfection] for French audiences, it’s interesting to see the addition of the name John McEnroe for American release. That’s not to say it doesn’t belong since Julien Faraut‘s documentary is very much about the famed tennis player, but that its use as a clarifier may misrepresent how the film approaches said subject. What we’re actually watching beyond McEnroe and the sport itself as captured in the early 1980s by Gil de Kermadec (France’s first national…

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REVIEW: 未来のミライ [Mirai no Mirai] [Mirai] [2018]

Jared Mobarak

I don’t like everyone! Young Kun (Moka Kamishiraishi) is excited to welcome his mother (Kumiko Asô) home after giving birth to his baby sister. I single out “mother” because she’s whom he misses. Dad (Gen Hoshino) has never really been around due to constantly working so Kun doesn’t necessarily have any affinity for the man. As for the new child: if she can’t pull her weight playing bullet trains with him, what’s the point of her even being there? Kun is barely removed from the toddler age scale himself, though,…

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