Flicks with The Film Snob

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...

A man searching for his runaway daughter joins a group of misfits on a journey through the desert and mountains of Morocco. When considering the subject of a world in turmoil, and on the brink of disaster, we may want a film to give us temporary escape, or it might try to sublimate our pain and fear in order to invoke transcendence of some kind. But in some rare cases, a filmmaker will choose to f...

Carmen Maura plays an 80-year-old woman who has lived her entire life in Tangier, but is threatened with eviction from her flat by her own daughter, who wants to move her to Madrid. We have a way of calling an experience “bittersweet” when it involves both sorrow and joy. Moroccan director Maryam Touzani has fashioned that idea into an explicit narrative method in her latest film Calle Málaga. The...

A temperamental Mexican chef, one of many immigrants working in a New York restaurant, gets into trouble with his bosses. It’s a pleasure to witness the growth of a film artist in real time, which I’ve been able to do in the case of Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios since watching his first film at a local festival back in 2014. Now with his fourth film, La Cocina, he’s reached a new level. It’...

Isabelle Huppert plays a French tutor in Korea with an unconventional method, in Hong Sang-soo’s exploration of the odd ways people communicate. I’m fascinated by the films of Korean director Hong Sang-soo. In style, narrative, and intent, they seem unique. He has ideas to convey, but they’re always manifested through the semi-improvisatory dialogue and action of the actors. We see how people navi...

In 1970, a seemingly normal young guy decides to organize a heist of his town’s local art museum. Kelly Reichardt makes movies that focus on the ordinary, telling stories of people navigating their unglamorous day-to-day lives, often as loners or outsiders. That might not sound interesting on the face of it, but it turns out there’s a strange kind of beauty in these lives that usually escape our n...

The story of an African immigrant in Paris, working under the radar while trying to obtain refugee status. The plight of the migrant, and the refugee, is a central story of our century. Now in a recent film called Souleymane’s Story, we witness three days in the struggle of one young man to win the right to asylum in France, where he wants to live and work. Souleymane, an immigrant from Guinea, pl...

A film about the leader of The Shakers, an 18th century religious group, uses songs and dancing to portray the fervent spiritual forces at work in the nonconformist Christian movement. We don’t see many film dramas about devoutly religious people—partly, I think, because the main action takes place inside a character, and this is hard to depict on screen. Mona Fastvold faces that challenge head-on...

A loner who thinks he’s been cheated by a mortgage firm takes the president of the company hostage, in a story based on actual events in 1977. The 1970s have, for quite awhile now, become a common time frame for American period films. That decade saw the youth counterculture emerge into the mainstream in clothing, lingo, long hair, and a tendency towards the weird and marginal, with multiple chall...

Jim Jarmusch presents three stories about parents and their grown up children. Jim Jarmusch started out as kind of an eccentric indie filmmaker, but over a career spanning 45 years, he’s become a legendary eccentric indie filmmaker. His latest movie is called Father Mother Sister Brother. It’s an anthology film, three short stories on a similar theme, put together to make one movie. This is a work...

Chris Dashiell celebrates his favorite films from last year. At the end of a year, film critics start putting out “Top 10” lists or “Top 20,” or whatever. They’re fun to do—going over all the movies you saw in a year and making a list of your favorites is fun. And for people really into films, they’re fun to read as well. But it still gets taken the wrong way, especially since the lists are often...

Jia Jhangke uses footage spanning twenty years to present this portrait of the incredible changes that have taken place in China. Jia Jhangke is, to my mind, the greatest living director in mainland China. His latest work, Caught by the Tides, actually seems to be a completely new kind of creation. We begin in 2001, with candid footage of mostly middle aged women nostalgically sharing and singing...

A man seeking refuge in a coastal city of 1977 Brazil doesn’t know that two men have been hired to kill him, in this brilliant portrait of life under dictatorship. The Secret Agent is the name of a new film by Brazilian writer and director Kleber Mendonça Filho. Right from the start with the title, we have ambiguity. It’s not a spy movie—no one is engaged in espionage. Rather, it’s presenting the...

Considered a failure upon its release in 1984, David Lynch’s version of Frank Herbert’s novel already displays the bold absurdism that the director would take further in his later films. I told someone the other day that I had seen all of the films by David Lynch. But later I realized that I’d forgotten Dune, from 1984, the one widely considered a failure. The completist in me decided I had to wat...