Tag: Gary Lewis

FANTASIA15 REVIEW: Catch Me Daddy [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“Why did I create you?” Even though he’s absent until the film’s final sequence because the estranged daughter he’s hired bounty hunters to find is foremost in our attention, director Daniel Wolfe‘s quote explaining his story as “a man imprisoned by his own narrative” couldn’t be truer. Pakistani mobster—the only label befitting him after experiencing the violence wrought in his name—Tariq (Wasim Zakir) is behind everything from scared Laila (Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) and her white boyfriend Aaron (Connor McCarron) scraping together a trailer park life in hiding to son Zaheer…

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REVIEW: Joyeux Noël [Merry Christmas] [2005]

Jared Mobarak

“No, you’re just not living the same war as me” Back in 1914, war wasn’t fought through technology and computers, missiles being sent to destroy lives as though a video game victory—no, it was battled in the trenches, feet away from the enemy, watching for the glimpse of an eye to shoot. Military leaders and propaganda brainwash young men into vilifying those on opposite sides, turning them to monsters without souls, without compassion, without humanity. But that’s an over simplification; just as you have a wife, children, and family back…

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TIFF10 REVIEW: Neds [2010]

Jared Mobarak

“Marcus is in the garden, but … shhh” Young John McGill’s Aunt Beth, played by Marianna Palka, tells the boy, “your dreams are gonna come true, ya know”. It’s a telling statement once you watch Peter Mullan’s very Scottish—to the point it had English subtitles for an English language film—Neds. Sitting through the World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, I began to wonder if an adolescent in 1972 Glasgow could dream, let alone think it would become reality. The title is an acronym/abbreviation of the common Scottish detrimental…

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