Tag: Denise Gough

REVIEW: Martyrs Lane [2021]

Jared Mobarak

I have bad things in my head too. Ten-year old Leah (Kiera Thompson) is caught watching her family like an outsider looking in. Her much older sister (Hannah Rae‘s Bex) is about to leave for college and the milestone has seemingly thrown a wrench into their otherwise simple lives. While their father Thomas (Steven Cree) treats it like a celebration thanks to his faith as the pastor of their local church, their mother Sarah (Denise Gough) appears distracted and perhaps even angry. She begins having nightmares, retreats from the others,…

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TIFF20 REVIEW: Monday [2021]

Jared Mobarak

I’ll take you anywhere you want. Director Argyris Papadimitropoulos‘ Monday feels like it’s going to be a wild ride right from the start as Chloe (Denise Gough) screams into her phone at the voicemail of an assumed ex-boyfriend ditching their final goodbye before she heads back to America. Utter chaos is unfolding around her as the house party she’s stumbled into threatens to rage into the next morning with music, drugs, sex, and whatever else the Greeks in attendance have up their sleeve. Because the host (Yorgos Pirpassopoulos‘ Argyris) hears…

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REVIEW: The Other Lamb [2020]

Jared Mobarak

Do you accept my grace? To be born into a world with set doctrines is to have no choice—often because you don’t realize one exists. That’s the power systemic modes of oppression hold over their victims. We’re told that fighting back makes things worse. Fighting for survival makes those in positions to help facilitate that survival less interested in helping. So we’re asked to remain quiet. Accept our fate and be grateful for what we have and grateful to those who give it with “grace” and not as a salve…

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REVIEW: The Kid Who Would Be King [2019]

Jared Mobarak

Quick. Lift up the flaps. Another King Arthur retread? This was my first thought watching the trailer for Joe Cornish‘s The Kid Who Would Be King and probably a main contributor to why its box office was so poor (alongside an American aversion to thick British accents—albeit not nearly as thick as the writer/director’s brilliant debut Attack the Block). We’re barely two years removed from Guy Ritchie‘s acquired taste of a revision and not much further from the gritty magic-less one starring Clive Owen, so mustering enthusiasm isn’t guaranteed. What…

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REVIEW: Colette [2018]

Jared Mobarak

It might ruffle some feathers back home. What Wash Westmoreland (who co-wrote with his late husband Richard Glatzer and Rebecca Lenkiewicz) has done with Colette is craft an origin story for the famous, Nobel Prize-nominated French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. It begins in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye with her as the teenage daughter of poor country folk unable to pay a dowry to the successful Parisian entrepreneur who fancied her, Henry Gauthier-Villars (known by his more concise nom-de-plume, Willy). Colette soon moves to Paris with her new husband—who gave up his inheritance to follow…

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