If Beale Street Could Talk | www.jaredmobarak.com

Top 100 Films of the Decade: 2010-2019

2019/12/312020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

If you asked me in 2010 which studios’ films would be amongst my favorites over the next ten years, I probably would have answered two correctly: Fox Searchlight (11) and Sony Pictures Classics (7). Those are two independent shingles of big Hollywood names that have been pumping out quality pictures for decades. Next up would have been The Weinstein Company (5), Warner Bros. (4), Paramount (4), Universal (4), and Sony Pictures (3) because they were cinema. So why are they barely beating those other two combined? Because the game changed.…

Top Ten Films of 2018

2019/09/292020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

It’s a rare year when your top twenty-five films find the room to allow their usual Oscar-bait dramas to co-exist with foreign favorites, heartfelt documentaries, surreal comedies, and superhero fantasy adventures. Rarer still is a period of time such as 2018 wherein it happens two or three times over. And it’s not just about familiar faces leading the way either as the extensive list of first-time filmmakers who saw their works distributed in theaters nationwide the past twelve months goes a long way towards ensuring cinema has a bright future…

The 91st Oscars recap through tweets …

2019/02/252020/03/26 Jared Mobarak

What a wild ride this Oscars season has been. After so much recent talk about inclusivity and a changing of the guard, it was bound to happen that we’d receive an awkward period of flux. There’s the young crowd cheering a Marvel Cinematic Universe chapter to the franchise’s first Best Picture nominee and the older sect feeling warm and gooey about a story pretending to talk about racism despite really just glossing over the struggle to say most racists are simply misunderstood until sharing a bucket of KFC with the…

Picking Winners at the 91st Annual Academy Awards

2019/02/202020/03/26 Jared Mobarak

The 91st Annual Academy Awards hits airwaves Sunday, February 24th, 2019 at 8:00pm on ABC. For those handicapping at home, here are the guesses of Buffalo film fanatics Christopher Schobert, William Altreuter, and myself. Jared Mobarak: It’s the type of year where hashtags rhetoric simply won’t work. There’s just not one all encapsulating buzzword to touch upon the myriad problems these nominations face. What do you do when you have a film up for Best Picture that was directed by a known presumed sexual predator who was fired for not…

Online Film Critics Society Ballot 2018

2019/01/022020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

Below is my December 27th ballot for the 22nd annual Online Film Critics Society Awards honoring movies released domestically in the United States during the 2018 calendar year. Group winners are highlighted in red. (No option to abstain was supplied this year.) Best Picture #1 If Beale Street Could Talk #2 You Were Never Really Here #3 Hereditary #4 Eighth Grade #5 BlacKkKlansman #6 The Favourite #7 Annihilation #8 Roma #9 A Star Is Born #10 First Reformed #11 Suspiria Best Animated Film #1 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse #2 Mirai…

TIFF18 REVIEW: If Beale Street Could Talk [2018]

2018/09/102020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

Flesh of each other’s flesh. Fonny Hunt (Stephan James) puts out his arms for a hug upon seeing an old friend in Daniel (Brian Tyree Henry) after too much time and too many men their age have passed. Smiles and laughter enter the scene before they are soon replaced by beers and reminiscing. And then comes the hard truth of absence—the explanation of his disappearance. Daniel had been in jail two years for a crime he didn’t commit and Fonny feels for his plight. Despite anything he could possibly say…