Film Reviews | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Brian and Charles [2017]

2022/06/162022/06/16 Jared Mobarak

I was very low. Brian Gittins (David Earl) lives in a cottage well off the beaten path—proud that the nearest shop is about seven miles away. We assume this is his choice. That he enjoys the solitude. But even introverts need human interaction at some point. So, when the inevitable depression set in, Brian decided to build a friend. With a found head and some cogs to go with the levers he “knew were lying about,” Charles (Chris Hayward) is born. What starts as a one-sided dynamic wherein the latter…

REVIEW: Poser [2022]

2022/06/152022/06/16 Jared Mobarak

I belong here. More than a wallflower, Lennon Gates (Sylvie Mix) is a voyeur. It’s one thing to listen from afar and process what you’ve heard, but another to record it and absorb it as your own. That’s where her affinity for sound has brought her. What started as collecting ambient noise as though she were an aspiring foley artist has currently spilled over into personality, ideas, and opinions. Rather than learn about topics such as fine art, she attends gallery shows to record people’s pretentiously oblique insights so she…

REVIEW: Abandoned [2022]

2022/06/142022/06/16 Jared Mobarak

You said I could keep this one! A former preschool teacher from “the city,” Sara Davis (Emma Roberts) had been told by so many parents of the euphoric sense of love they cultivated the moment their child was born. She hoped it would wash over her too upon giving birth to her and husband Alex’s (John Gallagher Jr.) son Liam, but it simply never presented itself. It eluded her to the point of seeing a psychiatrist about postpartum depression and he agreed there was a problem. She subsequently rejected the…

REVIEW: Bitterbrush [2022]

2022/06/132022/06/14 Jared Mobarak

Hopefully the cows like it. While they don’t know it yet, this is the end of a five-plus year partnership range riding together in the American Pacific Northwest for friends Colie Moline and Hollyn Patterson. It’s also their most comfortable after trading the usual camper for an old cabin this summer. With only themselves and a crew of herd dogs for assistance, they take to the Idahoan plains in search of the beef cattle and calves they’ve been contracted to reclaim. The work is tiring and tenuous as far as…

REVIEW: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande [2022]

2022/06/122022/06/13 Jared Mobarak

So, what is your fantasy? Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) anxiously awaits her guest, fussing about her clothes and drinking champagne to ease her nerves. Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) finishes his coffee, smiling at the baristas as he waves goodbye before heading to the hotel. He knocks at the door. She startles, walking to it before lingering so long at the peep hole that he begins to bend to try and look back. Beyond their obvious age difference, this disparity of emotional and psychological calm is what’s most present when they…

TRIBECA22 REVIEW: A Wounded Fawn [2022]

2022/06/102022/06/13 Jared Mobarak

All your secrets are escaping. This weekend is supposed to be a rebirth for Meredith (Sarah Lind). After battling the demons of an abusive relationship, she’s accepted an invitation of romantic seclusion from a man (Josh Ruben‘s Bruce) she’s just met. Her friends demand to know all the details, but she’s not quite ready to share them. This might just be an isolated yet necessary sexual encounter that ends upon her return to the city. No reason to let him move into her head psychologically or her inner circle prematurely…

TRIBECA22 REVIEW: Natten har øjne [Attachment] [2022]

2022/06/082022/06/13 Jared Mobarak

Was that somehow my fault? Leah’s (Ellie Kendrick) reasons for being in Denmark are purely academic. At least, that’s what she tells former actress Maja (Josephine Park) upon meeting by accident at a bookshop. It’s a cutely fateful collision, the former with a stack of research and the latter dressed as an elf while running to an engagement to read to a bunch of school children. Maja’s haste causes a mix-up in their attempt to pick everything up, ensuring they must come together once more in calmer circumstances. A mug…

REVIEW: Crimes of the Future [2022]

2022/06/072022/06/07 Jared Mobarak

Body is reality. Much like how heartbreak proves necessary for love, pain is needed for life. To live anesthetized is to simply exist—unfeeling, unbothered, unmoved. It’s no wonder then that National Organ Registry investigator Wippet (Don McKellar) would chuckle when admitting how performance art has become the new rage. Everyone wants to be that thing that breaks through the monotony. They want to both push themselves to the point of artistic beauty through their numbed bodies and inspire audiences to do the same. Not everyone is equally successful, though. When…

TRIBECA22 REVIEW: Huesera [2023]

2022/06/062022/12/20 Jared Mobarak

Bleed from the inside. According to Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women who Run with the Wolves, the “Bone Woman,” or La Huesera, “collects and preserves that which is in danger of being lost to the world.” A Mexican myth sees her scouring the mountains and riverbeds for the remains of wolves, assembling what she finds to recreate the animal as though an ivory sculpture which will eventually become reanimated and ultimately reborn as a human woman freely laughing towards the horizon. They say she provides a glimpse of the…

REVIEW: A Raisin in the Sun [1961]

2022/06/042022/06/04 Jared Mobarak

Damn all the eggs in the world. Debuting in 1959, Lorraine Hansberry‘s A Raisin in the Sun became the first play written by a Black woman to get produced on Broadway. With four Tony nominations, it’s no wonder Hollywood jumped onboard to bring it from the stage to the screen two years later. Hansberry adapted herself with Daniel Petrie hired to take directing duties from Lloyd Richards as almost the entire cast of principal actors stayed put. Besides a sequence of Walter Lee Younger (Sidney Poitier) frustratingly jumping to attention…

REVIEW: Watcher [2022]

2022/06/022022/06/02 Jared Mobarak

You’re suspiciously quiet. Despite being half said in jest as a means of disarming Julia’s (Maika Monroe) fear, Irina’s (Madalina Anea) words are no less chilling. Her response to the former’s belief that someone is following her is to admit how never learning the truth may prove better than knowing. Better to “live with the uncertainty” than “find yourself bleeding out with ‘I told you so.’ caught on your lips.” That is the unfortunate reality illustrated by writer/director Chloe Okuno‘s feature debut Watcher (adapted from Zack Ford‘s original script and…