Flicks with The Film Snob

Poetry used to be widely read. It was considered important. Now, when most people don’t read it, poets may justifiably feel nostalgic about the days when intellectuals gathered in Greenwich Village coffee houses and wrote poems.  It’s been idealized, and in the new comedy-drama Late Fame, it’s a subject of wistful satire. Willem Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, an older man living in lower Manhattan who...

It had long been a dream of the director Akira Kurosawa to make a film adapting the great Maxim Gorky play “The Lower Depths” about the struggles of a group of destitute people living in a flophouse. It had been done before several times by other directors, but Kurosawa felt a strong connection with Russian literature. He’d already done a version of Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot,” and another of his fil...

Train Dreams is an historical drama taking place in the forests of the northwest United States during the early 20th century. You might think that the story has to do with trains, and a small part of it does, but the title really symbolizes the painful creation of the modern world in America, born from the sweat and toil of poor working people just trying to survive. The film is directed by Clint...

An arrogant, pretentious 19-year-old takes a job as a cook in a Cape Cod restaurant and is forced to grow up. In the opening scene of Tony, a comedy from Canadian director Matt Johnson, we see the 19-year-old title character, played by Dominic Sessa, applying for a writing fellowship at Vassar College in New York in 1975. Tony projects a persona of brash self-confidence that doesn’t succeed in hid...

A rediscovery of the great South African photographer who lived most of his life in exile in the U.S. Haitian director Raoul Peck has long been in the forefront of radical cinema. His recent documentaries include I Am Not Your Negro, the incisive portrait of James Baldwin from 2016, and Orwell: 2+2=5, which I reviewed last year. Right before the Orwell film he directed a portrait of another artist...

A young woman oppressed by her controlling mother discovers her own strength when she is encouraged by a psychiatrist to go out into the world. In 1942, Bette Davis was Warner Brothers’ biggest star. She’d attained this status not through conventional beauty, but through her talent, hard work, and incredible dramatic range. Her filmography up to that time is basically a list of classics. And now a...

A documentary details the murder trial of a landowner accused of killing an indigenous villager in Argentina, illuminating the long history of exploitation of native people in that country. Argentine writer-director Lucrecia Martel has long been exploring her country’s social tensions and contradictions in her dramatic films. Now in her latest film, she’s turned to documentary, in a project it’s t...

Two young fishermen take a job on a boat that has returned after disappearing for thirty years, in a film about the tragic paradoxes of time and mortality. In a mosaic of very brief shots—fragments really—we are shown an old stone and concrete quay above the seaside on a rainy day. A stout middle aged man sees a small boat in the dock below. There is no one on it. As he climbs in, there are close-...

Depicts one night in the life of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, when his partner Richard Rodgers premiers a new hit musical “Oklahoma!” done with a new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein. The Austin, Texas based director Richard Linklater is always trying new things. His latest movie is about the lyricist Lorenz Hart, who paired with composer Richard Rodgers to make 26 Broadway musicals in the 1920s, ‘30...

A Cold War thriller tells of an assassin hypnotized by the Chinese to kill a presidential candidate. A special brand of American movie emerged during the Cold War that I call the “paranoid thriller.” It started in the ‘50s as Hollywood’s way of exploiting the “Red Scare,” the fear and hatred of communism at home and abroad. As political events became more chaotic and disturbing in the ‘60s and ‘70...

A gritty crime film dramatizes a 2008 heist in Copenhagen, the biggest robbery in Danish history. The heist film is now a well-established genre. From the beginning, the stories have involved losers striving to become winners, underworld types who ultimately get tripped up by mistakes and by their own greed. Later, things became more light-hearted, even comic, as more or less glamorous crooks find...

Two films employing the horror genre to explore darker truths about relationships between men and women. A recent sort of “new wave” movement in horror films is discarding old ideas that were based only on scaring you. I offer two examples. My first example is called Sleep. It’s the debut feature of Korean writer and director Jason Yu, telling of a young wife, played by Jung Yu-mi, who notices tha...

Wim Wenders’ 1976 movie about two guys traveling around West Germany is a portrait of a time still haunted by the dark legacy of the recent Nazi past. Kings of the Road, a film by Wim Wenders from 1976, opens with a startling event. Bruno, a traveling movie projector repairman played by Rüdiger Vogler, is shaving next to his parked van when he sees a Volkswagen zoom off the road and into the Elbe...

Trying to describe the suffering of civilians in war tends to fall short—because abstractions, statistics, and an overview of generalities, creates distance in our minds, despite the degree of accuracy in reporting. We are individuals, and all human experience is such. Therefore we must see events on that level, and imagine being a person in the midst of all this, to genuinely understand. Iranian...

A rec league baseball game conveys a gently humorous truth about American men trying to hold on to the rituals of their younger days. On a Sunday afternoon in a small New England town, sometime in the 1990s, two amateur baseball teams play one last game on a field that will soon have to make way for a new school. They are what you call “rec” teams, short for recreational, that play for fun and all...

Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s final film is a metafictional journey through the world of Japanese war movies, and their relationship to the actual horrors of war. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi is famous in the West mainly for his film House, from 1977, which so far I know only by reputation as a wild, playful, and surrealist ride through the horror genre. But he’s directed over seventy films that are largely considered...

A man discovers a vast network of empty rooms and hallways, in a film about the dangers of the unconscious.  I just watched a weird and genuinely creepy film, currently getting a lot of attention, called Backrooms. One of the unusual aspects of this movie is that the plot, such at is, is secondary to the visual and auditory experience. A disorienting opening sequence takes the fuzzy point of view...

A young photographer insinuates himself into the entourage surrounding an up-and-coming pop singer. On social media, a lurker is someone who mostly just reads other people’s posts but, for whatever reason, rarely participates. In the recent film Lurker, written and directed by Alex Russell, this idea is combined with that of the fan or follower, someone devoted to or obsessed with a celebrity. The...

In Zambia, an extended family’s beloved uncle has died, but one of his nieces holds a secret about him. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Zambian writer and director Rungano Nyoni’s second feature film, is a highly accomplished ensemble drama about family secrets. Secrets don’t just reveal themselves right away, and the film’s style is accordingly a matter of glimpses and intuitions. Shula, a young woman...

A Canadian family must cope with the mental illness of the eldest son. When an artist attempts to illuminate painful memories, “less is more” is the general rule—one that is perhaps not followed frequently enough. Canadian director Sophy Romvari, after making award winning short films for ten years, adheres to that rule in her autobiographical first feature Blue Heron. Romvari was the youngest chi...

Two conspiracy nuts kidnap a woman CEO in the belief that she’s one of a group of extraterrestrials sent to destroy the planet. I missed seeing Bugonia, the latest film from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, when it was playing in theaters. I was a bit wary after being disappointed by his big spectacle Poor Things a few years ago, but I finally caught up recently and was unexpectedly taken with it....

Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of recovery from sexual abuse has been dramatized into a startling visionary film by Kristen Stewart. The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s first feature film as a director, is an adaptation of a memoir by the same title from fiction writer, poet, and essayist Lidia Yuknavitch. Yuknavitch grew up in San Francisco and Florida in the 1960s and ‘70s, was encouraged by a...

Cambodian director Rithy Panh dramatizes the true story of three journalists who were given permission to interview Pol Pot during the last few months of his murderous regime. At the age of fifteen Rithy Panh managed to escape the Cambodian genocide, but the entire rest of his family—his parents, sisters, and nephews—were murdered. He made his way to Paris, where he got interested in movies, and e...

Video artist Joseph Khalil’s first feature length film weaves a multitude of images exploring Black history, society, and culture. The cutting edge Los Angeles-based artist Khalil Joseph is the creator of many video installations in some of the world’s top museums. His short films have brought into focus vibrant dimensions of African American life, history, and culture. You may have seen some of h...

Stephen Sondheim’s 1981 musical goes backwards in time telling of three friends and their pursuit of fame and fortune on Broadway. I always thought the idea of telling a story in reverse chronological order was a relatively recent one—from Harold Pinter’s play “Betrayal” in 1978, to be exact. But I’ve just discovered that over a century ago, in 1923, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart did it in their...