Tag: Clea Duvall

REVIEW: Happiest Season [2020]

Jared Mobarak

Maybe another of your exes will bring out dessert. It’s Christmas week and romance is in the air as Abby (Kristen Stewart) and Harper (Mackenzie Davis) walk Pittsburgh one last night before going their separate ways for the holiday. The latter is so smitten under the stars and blinking lights that she throws caution to the wind to invite the former to come along and use the festivities as an excuse to finally meet her family. They’ve been living together for six months and Abby has no other relatives with…

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REVIEW: Passengers [2008]

Jared Mobarak

Better now than later. An explosion, crash, confused man, and burning plane: this is the sequence of images as Rodrigo García‘s Passengers commences. It’s a pretty straightforward visual set-up for the incident everything else will surround before his lead (Anne Hathaway‘s Dr. Claire Summers) is introduced during the next scene. She’s a trauma counselor enlisted by her boss (Andre Braugher‘s Perry) to take point on helping the small group of people who survived process the event. They’re all in differing stages of psychological distress with one remembering a fire (Ryan…

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REVIEW: Fame High [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“Engage us” A real life version of Fame on the west coast, Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s coming-of-age documentary Fame High shows us the pressures of pursuing an arts education and career at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. Shot over a period of sixteen months, the film follows four students as they battle expectations, desires, talent, hard work, and all the other teenage stuff us normal kids went through too. LACHSA has a 95% rate for college enrollment and prepares its students for the fierce competition inherent to…

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TIFF12 REVIEW: Argo [2012]

Jared Mobarak

“The United States government has just sanctioned your science fiction movie” In 1979, tensions between Iran and the United States reached a boil after Ayatollah Khomeini called for a return of his predecessor—Shah Pahlavi—in order to try him in what would be a kangaroo court whether or not deserved. Allowed passage into the US to attend the Mayo clinic and combat his cancer, the fact we were housing him infuriated a group of Islamist students and militant followers of the Imam’s Line to the point of storming the American embassy…

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