Category: Film Features

FANTASIA21 REVIEW: Yakuza Princess [2021]

Jared Mobarak

There are no harmless old men. We enter twenty years into the past at a birthday party in Japan. This wealthy family spared no expense for the celebration, but no amount of money can stop what’s coming. Swords are drawn, guns are fired, and soon enough everyone is dead save a little girl taken from her mother’s lifeless arms. The assumption is that the victors have stolen her to nurture as their own before the inevitable discovery of her real heritage and her subsequent desire for revenge. Learning the opposite…

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FANTASIA21 REVIEW: Giving Birth to a Butterfly [2021]

Jared Mobarak

It’s the awe that I want. We meet Diana Dent (Annie Parisse) readying matching wedding gowns soon revealed as not her own. She’s mending them to sell online—a necessity considering her bull-headed and controlling husband Daryl (Paul Sparks) is hell-bent on putting their life savings towards a dream of creating his own restaurant. That means no money for Drew (Owen Campbell) or Danielle’s (Rachel Resheff) college. No money to stop working extra hours at the pharmacy. No money for anything besides his selfish need to break free of a constrained…

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FANTASIA21 REVIEW: Paul Dood’s Deadly Lunch Break [2021]

Jared Mobarak

What did they teach you about revenge? A mother’s love can move mountains. It must in the case of Paul Dood (Tom Meeten) since he doesn’t really have anything else propelling him forward. Did he aspire to be a superstar? No. He merely asked his mum (June Watson‘s Julie) if she thought he had what it took while watching an episode of “Britain’s Got Talent”. She of course said, “Yes.” She said he was “better than anyone else on that show.” Love is blind, though, and unwittingly creates lies since…

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FANTASIA21 REVIEW: Droste no hate de bokura [Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes] [2021]

Jared Mobarak

I don’t know why. The logistics behind Droste no hate de bokura [Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes] are mind-boggling to fathom since time-travel stories are often confusing enough to keep straight when they aren’t filmed as a one-shot. The Europe Kikaku theatrical troupe embracing that extra challenge is thus wild. Group director Makoto Ueda admits he wouldn’t have written the script that way if he didn’t already trust his actors and know they could handle the experiment. Not that having them at his disposal necessarily made his and director Junta…

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FANTASIA21 REVIEW: Muerto con Gloria [Ghosting Gloria] [2021]

Jared Mobarak

Don’t be afraid of your senses, they are a wonderful gift. Sex is everywhere Gloria (Stefania Tortorella) turns. She can’t sleep because the people in the apartment above her are at it every single night like clockwork. A photographer takes antique images of couples outside the bookstore where she works—love captured with every smile. And her co-worker and best friend Sandra (Nenan Pelenur) has a new boyfriend each day to the point where Gloria never knows which beau she’s talking about. Gloria is tired, listless, and without any hope of…

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FANTASIA21 REVIEW: 哭悲 [The Sadness] [2021]

Jared Mobarak

I thought you were crazy like the other ones. The trigger warnings that accompany 哭悲 [The Sadness] at the Fantasia International Film Festival are no joke. The acts of violence that writer/director Rob Jabbaz has his characters inflict upon each other are as depraved as can be and seemingly devoid of remorse. It often feels like an Aphex Twin music video with enraged men and women stopping to turn and grin with blackened eyes before pouncing on their latest targets with relish. It therefore means something when we first see…

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CANNES21 REVIEW: Retour A Reims [Fragments] [2021]

Jared Mobarak

A war is waged on the dominated. The MIT Press describes Didier Eribon‘s book Returning to Reims as “A memoir and meditation on individual and class identity, and the forces that keep us locked in political closets.” The author never went back home upon leaving until after his father was moved to a nursing home for those afflicted by Alzheimer’s and it was only upon his return that he began to recognize the underlying factors that made its community what it became despite what it originally rose from. By looking…

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CANNES21 REVIEW: Aya [2021]

Jared Mobarak

We can’t leave our sand behind. Living on the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean would be a dream to many people. Not only is the view beautiful, but one’s ability to live a simple life can often be a welcome reprieve from the hustle and bustle of a city and its potential for disaster through culture shock and excess. The unfortunate truth of the world in which we currently live, however, is that nothing is simple anymore. Climate change has rendered coastal towns like the one in which Aya (Marie-Josée…

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CANNES21 REVIEW: H6 [2021]

Jared Mobarak

Laughter is a good remedy. Some hospitals are better suited for your needs than others no matter where you reside. Maybe you’re lucky and the best is local in case of emergency. Maybe you need to take the night train just to reach it for the opportunity to find a bed days later. And depending on insurance, you’re always forced to weigh your options with family before even beginning to think about attempting the services they offer. To therefore set a camera inside one of the busiest medical establishments within…

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CANNES21 REVIEW: El Empleado y El Patron [The Employer and the Employee] [2021]

Jared Mobarak

I’m sorry about what happened. All relationships are to some extent transactional, but none more than that between employer and employee. One provides capital and the other labor. This dynamic would be symbiotic in a perfect world since one can’t exist without the other: a boss cannot acquire the capital necessary to run a business without workers on the ground and those workers cannot live without a job with which to earn a steady wage. Even so, the disparity between them has grown exponentially throughout the past few decades. Executives…

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CANNES21 REVIEW: Are You Lonesome Tonight? [2021]

Jared Mobarak

Did you find him? Xue Ming (Eddie Peng) is in jail when we meet him. He’s talking about the boredom of living the same day repeatedly while thinking about how he got there. Deciding it’s better to show rather than tell, first-time director Shipei Wen sends us back to 1997 to find Xue on the telephone with an angry girlfriend just about fed up with waiting. It’s difficult to tell whether he’s on his way to the cinema late or simply going home when he finally leaves, but the path…

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