Tag: Defiance

TIFF15 REVIEW: Never Happened [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“Where’s my other earring?” For eight minutes Mark Slutsky makes sure he has us right where he wants us. Never Happened is so precisely measured in its construction and revelations that we don’t even know its true genre until the very end. Yes there’s comedy and romance and drama in its plot concerning two business partners engaging in a sexual relationship while out of town for a meeting, but their decision to forget the encounter brings with it a much larger understanding of the world in which they live than…

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REVIEW: Love & Other Drugs [2010]

Jared Mobarak

“Were you molested by a Care Bear?” What do you do when you read something about a movie that appears to ruin a key ingredient the trailer doesn’t show? You get pissed. I know I did when I read—yes, I’m going to tell you—that Anne Hathaway’s character Maggie in Love & Other Drugs has Parkinson’s. Here I thought the film looked like an above average rom/com and I get blindsided by this disease that has to end up playing a huge role in what goes on. And it does, the…

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REVIEW: Defiance [2008]

Jared Mobarak

“We should have killed the milkman” A World War II film showing the Jews fighting against the Nazis? It seems like something that is so obvious a topic to portray yet I don’t think it has been done. We’ve been shown Jews surviving, staying strong and getting through the years through help from the resistance, compromising their values to stay alive, or just sheer good luck. With Edward Zwick’s newest wartime epic—the man is a pro at them ever since Glory—titled Defiance we get the unthinkable. Here is a ragtag…

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