Suspense/Thriller | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: The Counselor [2013]

2013/11/072013/11/08 Jared Mobarak

“You are a glory” If I were to compareThe Counselor to any other movie I’ve seen of late it would have to be Andrew Dominik‘s Killing Them Softly. Both possess a darkly violent subject matter tempered by a series of off-putting, somewhat out-of-place comedic sequences with a bunch of familiar faces seemingly happy to go along for the ride without worrying about how much screen time they’ve actually accrued. While they could be cousins in tone and overall head-scratching befuddlement where meaning is concerned, however, they are far from the…

REVIEW: Captain Phillips [2013]

2013/11/062014/04/10 Jared Mobarak

“A little air might do him some good” Despite my affinity for director Paul Greengrass‘ entries to the Bourne Saga, his cinéma vérité style will always in my opinion be better suited for gritty, true-life tales such as the contemporary classics Bloody Sunday and United 93. (We’ll just forget Green Zone ever squeezed its way into his oeuvre.) As a result, his attachment to Richard Phillips‘ harrowing tale of getting hijacked by Somali pirates and subsequently kidnapped as a hostage for ten million dollars was a perfect marriage from the…

REVIEW: Eroticide [2013]

2013/09/262013/09/26 Jared Mobarak

“I’m the woman of his dreams. And you? You’re the silver medal.” With a title like Eroticide, it isn’t hard to imagine at least one character dying by the time the credits roll. Who of Matthew Saliba’s sexually warped love triangle will it be, though: the doormat, the predator, or the prey? Love, sex, and self-worth can combine to form any number of psychological cocktails just waiting to explode when the players find themselves lost in an unfamiliar territory like happiness. If you’ve lived your life in a way where…

REVIEW: A Single Shot [2013]

2013/09/182013/09/20 Jared Mobarak

“He’s got a hard bark on him” It’s a shame most people need an incident that risks taking their life to finally acknowledge they have one left to live. For John Moon (Sam Rockwell), this moment comes on a morning hunt like many others. Already with three arrests for poaching deer, this specific excursion finds his aim off. Needing to chase his mark and eventually shoot blindly at movement in the corner of his eye, the kill lying motionless and choking in blood opposite his barrel comes into focus as…

REVIEW: Prisoners [2013]

2013/09/172013/09/18 Jared Mobarak

“Pretty soon all that stands between you and being dead is you” The question is simple: How far would you go to save your child? The dynamics, however, are more complex when the man reconciling his soul to those ends is one who’s held God’s love as a beckon of security close to his heart. Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners opens with Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) saying an “Our Father” as his son Ralph (Dylan Minnette) readies to kill his first deer. The words have a calming effect, one that’s helped this…

TIFF13 REVIEW: Gravity [2013]

2013/09/072014/06/16 Jared Mobarak

“You should see the sun on the Ganges. It’s amazing.” Remember back in the 90s at the advent of IMAX technology how certain amusement parks would have a screen with some “experience” putting you “into the action”? Well Alfonso Cuarón has made one of those for the twenty-first century in Gravity. While I admit such a description may seem like I’m putting the film in a bad light—simplifying it to its basest aesthetic trait—I honestly mean it as a compliment. Space has always been one place to which only a…

REVIEW: Getaway [2013]

2013/08/272013/08/30 Jared Mobarak

“Smash into everything you can” The Oscar for Best Actor goes to Jon Voight‘s jowls. Supporting? That would be the high-definition salt and pepper stubble poking through the screen as he gulps martinis with olive chasers. But if you really want award-winning, give something to editor Ryan Dufrene because I have to believe he spliced together the most ever cuts in a feature length film despite Getaway only lasting 94 minutes. He would be the man responsible for that, right? I mean if director Courtney Solomon storyboarded this thing like…

TIFF13 REVIEW: 2013 Short Cuts Canada Programmes

2013/08/272013/09/16 Jared Mobarak

Programme 1 A far cry from the documentary short Joda—a visual letter to Jafar Panahi—that was included in the TIFF Short Cuts Canada Programme last year, graphic designer turned filmmaker Theodore Ushev’s Gloria Victoria is all about the visceral and aural capabilities of film without something as unnecessary as words. Full of sumptuous textured layers formed by sketch drawings, Russian Constructivist elements, what I believe were faces from Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, and more, the rising crescendo of Shostakovich’s “Invasion” from Symphony No. 7 helps spur on an emotive war in…

TIFF13 REVIEW: A Field in England [2013]

2013/08/222015/09/17 Jared Mobarak

“Open up and let the devil in” A coward becomes a man. I guess this is the crux of Ben Wheatley’s newest thriller, A Field in England. We find Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) hiding in the bushes while mortars explode around him during battle, weeping and praying to God to keep him hidden now that his mission to find an elusive old comrade seems all but futile and way too dangerous. He runs, meets a few other deserters in a mid-17th century English Civil War pitting the Parliamentarians against the Royalist…

REVIEW: Closed Circuit [2013]

2013/08/162013/08/28 Jared Mobarak

“The judicial process in this country is and will remain fair and transparent” Director John Crowley is a man with good luck picking screenplays. His feature film debut Intermission is a fun Irish romp while drama Boy A is in my opinion criminally underrated and ignored. So, seeing him sign onto a project written by the man behind Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises—Steven Knight—was an exciting discovery, especially after finding the thriller’s trailer to be intriguing enough without spoiling too much of its conspiratorial plot. And everything does work…

REVIEW: Only God Forgives [2013]

2013/08/13 Jared Mobarak

“No matter what happens, keep your eyes closed” I’ve never seen a film by Alejandro Jodorowsky, but it doesn’t take a long glimpse into the auteur’s internet biographies to understand why Nicolas Winding Refn dedicated his Only God Forgives to the legend. Descriptions are riddled with labels such as “avant-garde”, “violently surreal”, “mystical”, and “religiously provocative”—terms also very clearly formed while watching this newest, meditative jaunt through the stoic minds of morally tortured killers from the critically acclaimed director of Drive. More akin to his ethereal visual poem Valhalla Rising,…