Flicks with The Film Snob

Mike Leigh’s 1988 breakthrough film already contains what makes him great: working class issues, funny believable characters, and a fine sensitivity for the miseries of family life. For decades I’ve been enjoying and writing about the films of English director Mike Leigh: Secrets & Lies , Topsy-Turvy , Vera Drake , these are just a few examples. But it was only recently that I watched his brea...

A brother and sister, their addict mother in jail, try to get by under the poverty line in a depressed southern Ohio town, and end up hanging out with some dangerous people. Out of nowhere comes this film, entitled Holler , from writer-director Nicole Riegel, and it is really something; a beautiful portrait of down-and-out working class life. It’s hard to believe this is Riegel’s debut feature; it...

Almodóvar’s latest explores the ambiguities of motherhood, while also spotlighting the issue of memory in the Spanish Civil War. Spanish writer and director Pedro Almodóvar’s previous film from 2019, Pain and Glory , was a triumph that to many seemed like a summing up of his entire career. Rather than trying to top that somehow, his new movie, Parallel Mothers , covers ground that by now is pretty...

In 1937, Warner Brothers released a film attacking the rise of hate groups in America that were terrorizing immigrants and minorities. Humphrey Bogart stars in this extraordinary movie. After the Second World War, a lot of what had been happening in the U.S. before the war was swept under the rug and forgotten. Nazism and fascism were seen as things that happened in Germany and Italy, an evil that...

A film about an agent of a Swiss bank working to support the military dictatorship in 1980s Argentina reveals how little it takes for people to look away from evil when being silent is to their advantage. Already we feel a sense of constriction, an oppressive claustrophobia and holding in of emotions, before we even know exactly what we’re looking at in Swiss director Andreas Fontana’s debut film,...

Jane Campion’s first film in twelve years examines deceptive notions of manhood on a cattle ranch in 1920s Montana. New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion was a big part of the cinematic breakthrough of her home country, and Australia, in the 1980s and ‘90s. She’s still best known for 1993’s The Piano , but her subsequent work has maintained her reputation for excellence. However, she hadn’t made a th...

Jacques Rivette’s experimental joyride features two women whose explorations of a haunted house serve to turn all the conventions of film and genre upside down. French director Jacques Rivette has been subverting narrative expectations for most of his career. It seems to be his mission in life to turn the art of storytelling inside out, allowing us to see how the construction of stories in our hea...

A tragic love story with echoes from a German fairy tale shows director Christian Petzold exploring the heavy influence of the past on relationships in the present. German writer-director Christian Petzold has become, for me, one of those filmmakers that whatever movie he makes, I’m going to see it. He is consistently daring in his narrative and stylistic choices, exploring ideas about society, re...

The true story of a large Romanian family living in a wilderness area facing the threat of being forced to move to the big city. The picture opens with a group of boys playing in a lake, trying to catch fish by hand, chasing birds, having fun being boys. They are part of a large family living in what appears to be a remote wilderness area, a mother and father and their nine kids with dogs, playing...

An ambitious young man from a lower caste seeks to prosper by attaching himself to a corrupt businessman and his family, in this thriller doubling as a satire of modern India. The deep chasm between rich and poor in India is the subject of a terrific new film from Ramin Bahrani called The White Tiger . Adapted from a best selling debut novel by Aravind Adiga, the story concerns Balram Halwai, a yo...

Emma Seligman’s debut feature uses a shiva, a Jewish post-funeral gathering, as the setting for a comedy about a young woman who doesn’t fit in, but tries to act like she does. Shiva Baby, a comedy of discomfort from Canadian writer/director Emma Seligman, opens with college senior Danielle, played by Rachel Sennott, having sex with a slightly older man named Max. When they’re done, she hints at a...

A new film from the West African nation of Ivory Coast presents an intriguing allegory about power and its misuse. Night of the Kings , the second narrative feature of Ivorian director Philippe Lacôte attracted critical notice, and won the Amplify Voices award for films from smaller countries at the Toronto Film Festival. A huge prison in the middle of the rain forest has been abandoned by the sta...

Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film portrays the difficult yet tender world of runaways. One of my favorite working American directors is Gus Van Sant. His adventurous style was evident in his early films, of which one of the finest is his 1991 effort, My Own Private Idaho . In My Own Private Idaho , the late River Phoenix plays Mike Waters, a young street hustler wandering through the Pacific Northwest, who...

One of the most unusual examples of propaganda ever filmed, made in the midst of the Second World War, imagines what it would be like if Germans captured a small English town in preparation for a major invasion. Propaganda has gotten a bad name over the years. All it means, really, is information that presents a point of view, usually of a political nature, but so often it has meant governments tr...

A veteran of Soviet cinema presents a powerful drama about an incident in 1962, when factory workers in a Don Region city go on strike, and a true believer in Stalinism must face the consequences of the corruption she has supported. Andrei Konchalovsky is one of the last of the great “second generation” in Soviet cinema. He started in Russia in the 1970s, and eventually came to Hollywood. He’s alw...

Mikio Naruse’s great 1960 film presents a compassionate view of the life of bar hostesses in a disreputable section of Tokyo. I find it puzzling that Japanese director Mikio Naruse didn’t become more well-known in the West. His films are honest, complex, and mature, done in a very modern, forward-looking style. In his great 1960 film called When a Woman Ascends the Stairs , he introduces us to an...

Five films from British director Steve McQueen, depicting the experiences of West Indian British families in London from the late 1960s through the 80s, is one of the great cinematic achievements of the century. What have you been doing during the pandemic? Well, British director Steve McQueen, best known for the Academy Award winning film 12 Years a Slave, has been very busy. He released five mot...

The true story of the 2018 effort to rescue thirteen boys trapped in a huge flooded cave in Thailand is more exciting than most fiction. There are true stories that are so exciting, documentary filmmakers must dream about the chance of covering them. A new film called The Rescue is a good example of this: it’s about the boys’ soccer team trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand in the summer of 2018....

Twenty years after the release of Shunji Iwai’s film about early adolescence, the movie’s insights and prescience about the effects of the internet are still remarkably fresh. Twenty years ago, in 2001, the internet was really taking off—the steady increase in internet use was accelerating, especially among young people. That year, a film by Japanese writer-director Shunji Iwai was released called...

Thomas Vinterburg’s Oscar-winning comedy tells of four men who decide to use a small amount of alcohol to reinvigorate their jobs and personal lives, with troubling results. Another Round, the latest film from Danish director Thomas Vinterburg, is a comedy with what most viewers will immediately recognize as an implausible and frankly ridiculous premise, but as tends to be the case with good comed...

The traditional way of beekeeping preserved by a Macedonian woman runs up against the modern motive for profit at all costs, in this gorgeous documentary. It’s difficult for a documentary filmmaker to do justice to the practices of what you might call “traditional” people, that is, people whose customs and livelihood have persisted from a time before the modern era, for which the industrial revolu...

Ken Loach and Paul Laverty present another great film about working class life: a portrait of an English family having to find a way to support themselves and each other in the new “gig” economy. A middle aged man is talking about his employment history in a job interview, reciting a litany of previous jobs. He then says, “I’d rather work on my own and be my own boss.” The interviewer picks up on...

The latest film by the darkly absurdist Swedish director Roy Andersson tackles the vexing subject of religion. Whenever I review a film by Roy Andersson, I feel like I have to prepare my audience again for how weird the work of this Swedish writer and director is. The style is consistent: his films are composed of discrete scenes in long takes with a stationary camera, and with spare looking sets...

Werner Herzog presents a portrait of his friend, the journalist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin; while Patricio Guzmán examines the mountain range dividing Chile’s coast from its interior, drawing conclusions both literal and symbolic. Bruce Chatwin was an English travel writer, journalist, novelist, and sort of an amateur anthropologist as well. His meteoric writing career started at the Times of...

Getting old is the source of fear in a new horror movie by Natalie Erika James, about a woman on the edge of dementia whose daughter and granddaughter visit, trying to help. Filmmakers are still finding new themes and methods to incorporate into horror movies. Despite the genre’s persistent image as unserious and even trashy, there have always been artists expressing truths about human beings and...