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REVIEW: Madre [Mother] [2017]

2019/01/222020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Why hasn’t he come back? A woman (Marta Nieto‘s Marta) and her mother (Blanca Apilánez) arrive at the former’s apartment talking about men. Marta speaks about friends, her mother leans into romanticism when the subject of a handsome gentleman comes up, and some jealousy arrives when it’s explained that he’s already attached to someone else. The stakes are thus very low at the start of Rodrigo Sorogoyen‘s short film Madre [Mother]—innocuous, every day fodder to create conflict where none exists as a means for intrigue. We are thus allowed to…

Online Film Critics Society Ballot 2017

2017/12/242020/04/17 Jared Mobarak

Below is my December 24th ballot for the 21st annual Online Film Critics Society Awards honoring movies released domestically in the United States during the 2017 calendar year. Each category is ordered according to my preferential rankings. Group winners are labeled in red. (We were only allowed to vote for one nominee per category this year, but I ranked them all like previous years anyway.)

REVIEW: mother! [2017]

2017/09/122017/12/18 Jared Mobarak

“His words are yours” Paramount has taken pains to ensure you know as little about Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! as possible. I know this because they’ve made it very difficult to find any images with which to populate this review. Their press site has no entry. The Toronto International Film Festival site contains no stills. And my local publicist made it very clear that press wasn’t allowed to bring a plus one to the screening. I’m surprised the studio let it play TIFF and Venice at all since that only means…

REVIEW: 마더 [Mother] [2009]

2010/04/102019/12/29 Jared Mobarak

“See, anyone is capable of murder” The poster for Bong Joon-ho’s newest work 마더 [Mother], along with the one word title, screams thriller where the mother at hand will do anything for her child. Bin Won’s Yoon Do-joon appears wide-eyed and scared, hiding himself behind Hye-ja Kim, a woman with steely determination to protect him. So, when the film begins with an odd sequence of Kim wandering aimlessly through a field of tall grass, eventually breaking out into an interpretative dance to the music superimposed over the imagery, I couldn’t…