Category: Drama

REVIEW: Memory Box [2022]

Jared Mobarak

We eat with the dead and ghosts. Christmas Eve was supposed to be a nice quiet evening for three generations of women: Alex (Paloma Vauthier), her mother Maia (Rim Turki), and her grandmother Téta (Clémence Sabbagh). Like has been happening so often, however, the youngest found herself home alone. Mom was working. Téta had yet to arrive. Alex was left wondering what her father and his new family were doing while conversing with friends via a group chat on her phone. And then a package arrives from Lebanon with a…

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REVIEW: Elvis [2022]

Jared Mobarak

He was a taste of forbidden fruit. There’s a lot to talk about when dealing with Elvis Presley. Too much for one film to do him justice. That’s why Baz Luhrmann (who writes with Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, and Jeremy Doner) decides to tell someone else’s story instead: that of Colonel Tom Parker, the self-proclaimed “Snowman” who discovered the King and helped make him an American icon. Unfortunately, he also probably played the biggest role in killing him thanks to the pills and injections necessary to keep Elvis on-stage and…

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FANTASIA22 REVIEW: 大怪獣のあとしまつ [Daikaijyu no Atoshimatsu] What to Do with the Dead Kaiju?] [2022]

Jared Mobarak

We’re protecting people’s right not to know. The easiest way to describe the tone of Satoshi Miki‘s realization of an objectively ingenious concept (What happens to the rotting carcass of a defeated kaiju?), is to mention the question to which every journalist demands an answer after a blister filled with the gaseous byproduct of the monster’s decomposition bursts: Does it smell like poo or puke? If that sounds like your idea of a good time for two hours, Daikaijū no Atoshimatsu [What to do with the Dead Kaiju?] is for…

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FANTASIA22 REVIEW: Da-eum-so-hee [Next Sohee] [2022]

Jared Mobarak

 Let’s do this. And here I thought capitalism’s hold on the American education system by way of unpaid internships was bad. As documented in July Jung‘s extern drama Da-eum-so-hee [Next Sohee], what’s happening in South Korea is even worse. It all comes down to incentives—not for the children, but the institutions profiting off their labor. When big companies with huge executive payrolls (since managers need managers who also need managers while hourly employees become statistical cogs in the slave machine) need cheap and naïve workers to fill call center desks…

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FANTASIA22 REVIEW: Incroyable mais vrai [Incredible But True] [2022]

Jared Mobarak

There’s a jewel? We all get older. It’s a part of life. Some do so gracefully. Others racked with fear. What’s interesting, and a major component of Quentin Dupieux‘s latest absurdist comedy Incroyable mais vrai [Incredible But True], is that few know which they are until they confront a potential avenue to cheat aging altogether. That’s the case with Alain (Alain Chabat) and Marie Duval (Léa Drucker). If we asked them how they felt about the subject at the start of the film, they’d probably say they hadn’t really thought…

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FANTASIA22 REVIEW: さがす [Sagasu] [Missing] [2022]

Jared Mobarak

They deserve to be delivered. Santoshi Harada (Jirô Satô) has a plan. It concerns a three-million-yen reward for helping to capture the infamous serial killer known as “No-Name” (Hiroya Shimizu). Santoshi says he saw him on the train to work. The man who’s been all over the news is inexplicably here in town right now and he’s pretty sure he knows where he can find him. Except, of course, that Santoshi is in no shape to “find” anyone. He’s been clinically depressed and unable to hold a full-time job since…

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REVIEW: Resurrection [2022]

Jared Mobarak

Do you think you could kill someone? It starts with a hair. Both a blemish ruining an otherwise immaculate office and a remnant of someone no longer present. Then there comes a tooth implausibly found within the change pouch of a wallet, escalating those aspects while moving beyond innocuous to menacing. Because a hair isn’t a threat—not on its surface. Neither is a tooth except for it being found somewhere much less readily available to strangers than an entire room. Taken together they demand we stop and pause, though. What…

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FANTASIA22 REVIEW: Chorokbam [2022]

Jared Mobarak

Why do I have to do all your dirty work? This is not a happy family. Dad (Tae-hoon Lee) works a night security guard shift that makes it so he arrives home as Mom (Min-Kyung Kim) leaves to dry peppers in the sun the next morning. He wants quiet. She wants support. They ultimately sit in silence while eating. Their son (Kang Gil-woo) works as an aide for the disabled, driving around and taking care of patients on the way to their appointments. He doesn’t make much—at least not enough…

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REVIEW: Not Okay [2022]

Jared Mobarak

Can’t offensive be, like, a brand? I’m not saying you couldn’t want to pivot careers from photo-compositor to writer, but to make it seem like A) the former is just a matter of loosely using the lasso tool in Photoshop to make a perfect mask that’s good enough to fool the world and B) that it’s a stepping-stone job shunted to the corner and treated like an internship because “anyone can do it” put me in a bad mood right away. I get it, though. Writer/director Quinn Shephard needs her…

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FANTASIA22 REVIEW: Sissy [2022]

Jared Mobarak

Be there or die. There’s some delicate subject matter at the heart of Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes‘ Sissy. It’s unavoidable when you’re spring-boarding off an objectively tragic event that occurred during childhood. Because, while young Sissy may have been the one who physically assaulted Alex when they were age twelve, that isolated and impulsive act of violence was ignited by months or years of psychological torment inflicted by the injured. Does the event make Sissy a monster regardless of those circumstances? Or can society look beyond the visual aftermath…

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REVIEW: My Old School [2022]

Jared Mobarak

Who touched my Chardonnay? When you have a story as wild as the one surrounding the sixteen-year-old Canadian student “Brandon Lee” enrolling in Glasgow’s Bearsden Academy, it truly is impossible to believe a movie hasn’t already been made. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, though. Alan Cumming was attached to play the lead role twenty-five years ago only to see the project evaporate. So, it’s fitting that writer/director Jono McLeod (a former classmate of “Lee’s” who witnessed the whole ordeal himself) would enlist the actor to play him now—this…

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