Flicks with The Film Snob

A dying man experiences the tragic dualism of past and present, in Andrei Tarkovsky’s autobiographical masterpiece The Mirror. Perhaps the best way to indicate the very unusual nature of The Mirror , Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 masterwork , is to say that it is both the most painstakingly structured of Tarkovsky’s films and the least linear of his narratives. Although the director claimed that the pic...

A film by Channing Godfrey Peoples tells of a single mother (Nicole Beharie) in an African American neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas, who wants her daughter to run in the Miss Juneteenth pageant, and must come to terms with her own past in the process. Miss Juneteenth, the debut feature of writer/director Channing Godfrey Peoples, introduces us to Turquoise Jones, Turq for short, an African Ameri...

In an industrial town in China, the lives of four people (three young, one old) intertwine on a day darkened by hostility, powerlessness, and revenge. The film is An Elephant Sitting Still , by a young Chinese director named Hu Bo. The title comes from a newspaper story related by one of the characters: supposedly there is a zoo elephant in a distant town that no matter how it is treated—yelled at...

In his first western, Tom Hanks plays an itinerant news reader from Texas who tries to transport a young girl who was an Indian captive to her relatives. The traditional conventions of the western presuppose a lot of assumptions about America that we’ve since learned are untrue or at least are much more complex. English director Paul Greengrass, now established as a prominent Hollywood filmmaker,...

Transposing Jack London’s autobiographical novel to Italy, Pietro Marcello highlights the conflict of socialist idealism with the individualistic drive that culminates in fascism. Jack London was a man of contradictions. An adventurer who became early 20th century America’s most popular author, he’s remembered today mainly for his stories of the Klondike gold rush, especially “The Call of the Wild...

Anthony Hopkins turns in one of his greatest performances in this portrait of a man becoming increasingly lost to dementia. The Father is a film about an elderly man suffering from dementia. It started in 2012 as a French play by Florian Zeller, and last year Zeller directed this movie version, which stars Anthony Hopkins, adapting the play into an English script with the help of the renowned scre...

A man’s last hours are spent being moved from hospital to hospital within the maze of the Romanian health care system, in this devastating portrait of mortality and disregard from 2005. Throughout its history, cinema has blossomed in various countries or regions at certain times, and since the 1960s we’ve been in the habit of calling these film movements a “New Wave” or something equivalent, after...

Riz Ahmed plays a rock drummer who loses his hearing and must come to terms with being a deaf person, in Darius Marder’s moving drama. There have been times when I’ve avoided or delayed seeing a film because of an impression that I got from ads or previews. In the case of Sound of Metal , a recent film by Darius Marder, I somehow had the idea that it was the story of a heavy metal drummer trying t...

The film version of August Wilson’s play about a jazz recording session in 1927 features Viola Davis in the title role, and Chadwick Boseman as the dramatic center, of a story about the corrosive bitterness of American racism. A few years ago I saw August Wilson’s 1982 play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in an Arizona Theatre Company production in Tucson. It was excellent. Then, last year, George C. Wol...

Catherine Deneuve plays a famous actress in conflict with her daughter, played by Juliette Binoche, in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first film made outside of Japan. Over the past 25 years, Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda has created a unique body of work, characterized by a gentle and humane outlook on life, often featuring stories about children and families. He’s never aimed for big commercial popu...

In a Leningrad hospital, two women deal with the aftereffects of their experiences in World War II, in a powerful examination of trauma by a young Russian director. The trauma that happens to people in wartime is a theme so difficult that it almost seems impossible to portray in a film, but that hasn’t stopped filmmakers through the years from trying, so central and so important is this experience...

Minari , the latest film from writer-director Lee Isaac Chung, tells the story of an immigrant Korean family’s struggle to make a new life in the United States. The young father, Jacob, played by Steven Yuen, has scraped together enough money to buy some farmland in Arkansas, after years of dull and repetitive toil in the California poultry industry. His wife Monica, played by Yeri Han, is shocked...

Alice Rohrwacher’s two-part fable portrays the fragility of goodness in a corrupted world. We’ve often heard about the problem of evil, framed in the context of theology, philosophy, or in literature. It’s less common to hear about the problem of goodness. What would that even mean? A few authors have tried to portray a perfectly good character. The comic realm seems easier in this regard: Cervant...

A Danish action film starts out looking like just another revenge drama, but then pulls the rug out from under the audience in a delightful way. It’s fairly easy to describe a revenge-themed action thriller. First an evil criminal does something terrible, hurting innocent people, so the action hero takes justice into his own hands to make the evil guy pay. Often it’s the hero’s loved ones or famil...

Time profiles a woman fighting for her husband to get parole, against the background of unequal sentencing of African Americans, while MLK/FBI tells of J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King. Two documentaries, one personal, one historical, about the African American quest for justice. Time , a film by Garrett Bradley, examines the reality of incarceration in the United State...

The moral no-man’s land of modern Romania is depicted in Corneliu Porumboiu’s latest picture as an ironic version of film noir. Romanian writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu is fascinated by the ways that language is used to wield power. He’s explored these themes in films that have political and psychological implications and that look inward at the act of moviemaking itself. In his latest film, Th...

David Fincher’s witty drama about the Hollywood screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz recreates classic Hollywood style while satirizing its illusions. Mank, the latest film from director David Fincher, centers on the Hollywood writer and curmudgeon Herman Mankiewicz, nicknamed “Mank” for short, and the circumstances surrounding his writing of the original screenplay for Orson Welles’ classic film Citize...

Kirsten Johnson brings us closer to the acceptance of mortality in a mischievous film that uses stunts and special effects to depict various scenarios of her 88-year-old father’s death. Dick Johnson is Dead . Now, that’s a movie title that jumps out at you. Surprisingly, this is a non-fiction film, what we usually call a documentary, although in this case I prefer the term “essay film.” And among...

A young couple stays at the house of author Shirley Jackson and her husband, getting drawn into their chaotic relationship, in a film that illuminates the mind and creative process of Jackson, a brilliant and eccentric literary figure played by Elisabeth Moss. Shirley Jackson was an American writer whose style and subjects reveal a dark sense of humor, coupled with a strong feeling for the cruelty...

Charlie Kaufman’s latest mindbender tells the story of a young couple on a voyage, a strange trip into the uncertainty of self and other. I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Charlie Kaufman’s fourth film as a director, is a mind-bending metaphysical puzzle focusing on the mysteries of self and other, loneliness and relationship. Jessie Buckley plays Lucy, an extremely self-conscious intellectual whose...

An amazing simulated documentary celebrates the world of neighborhood bars: the situation is invented, but the people are real. If you’ve ever gone to a neighborhood bar frequently, for a year or more, you know that a place like that has what they call “regulars,” folks that are there day after day, for whom the bar is a kind of second home or community. And among these regulars you hear many conv...

Chris Dashiell presents his favorite films released in 2020. Among the dreadful costs of our shared global disaster, one of the least important was the shutting down of movie theaters. Count it among the many losses of “normality” required for the public good. New films were released, and we watched them at home via streaming platforms. I believe that movies are best experienced on a big screen wi...

A delightful and humorous celebration of sexual fetishes, as practiced by solitary people trying to get beyond social repression to create pleasure; a rare live action offering from Czech animator Jan Svankmajer. The brilliant Czech animator Jan Svankmajer makes films that explore the nether reaches of our minds and behavior, with a sensibility so odd that it’s unclassifiable. His 1996 film Conspi...

A 1982 documentary presents the myriad ways that the U.S. government deceived and indoctrinated the public about nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Released at the beginning of the Reagan era, in a time of heightened Cold War rhetoric, the 1982 film The Atomic Café is a documentary about the way the U.S. government framed the dangers of the nuclear age to its citizens, from the late 1940s to the...

Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 fable of a medieval knight grappling with questions about God and Death was the film that first brought him international fame. The Seventh Seal was Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s seventeenth film, made in 1957, and it was the first to propel him to international fame. It’s easy to see why. A film of intense, dreamlike imagery, it surprised audiences with its conviction th...