Jessica Henwick | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery [2022]

2022/11/142022/11/20 Jared Mobarak

I gave you the truth. Even world-renowned private detectives like Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) get restless during lockdown. Just as Rian Johnson‘s Knives Out put some tongue-in-cheek gags a la Trumpism and the rise of fascism under the façade of politics, his sequel Glass Onion injects a bit of COVID pandemic fatigue in much the same way. Whereas that window dressing continued throughout the former via juxtaposing a Latina lead against her affluently entitled white employers, it ends here quite early so that the mystery itself can take center stage.…

REVIEW: The Matrix Resurrections [2021]

2021/12/302021/12/31 Jared Mobarak

Desire and fear, baby. Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) are dead. There’s no denying this fact. They sacrificed themselves for the salvation of humanity, traveling to a machine city to explain to the source code that Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) had gone far enough rogue to threaten the viability of the entire experiment and thus both of their species. Trinity passed first (but not before seeing the real sun for the first time in generations). Neo went next, his deal for peace with the machines being contingent on…

REVIEW: On the Rocks [2020]

2021/01/042021/01/04 Jared Mobarak

It was heartbreaking … for everyone. Before the first image of Sofia Coppola‘s On the Rocks arrives on-screen, we hear Felix’s (Bill Murray) voice to a teenaged Laura: “You’re mine until you get married. Then you’re still mine.” It’s the type of goofy sentiments Dads tell their daughters and we dismiss it as such when she replies with a sarcastic, “Okay.” The choice is a correct one too once we meet them in the present. Felix is an aging art dealer lothario for whom Laura (Rashida Jones) is his sole…

REVIEW: Love and Monsters [2020]

2020/10/162020/10/16 Jared Mobarak

Man, Todd loved that goldfish. We’re seven years past the apocalypse. Eight years since the world banded together to send every nuclear missile on Earth into the sky to stop an asteroid hell-bent on destroying all life. Things obviously didn’t work out too well if the latter wasn’t able to stop the former. Ends up that that much radioactivity falling back down through the atmosphere was just as cataclysmic—killing off a lot of the population and mutating cold-blooded animals/insects into giant monsters that ultimately killed the rest. Ninety-five percent of…