Flicks with The Film Snob

Alf Sjöberg’s 1951 adaptation of the famous Strindberg play illuminates the dark ambiguity of this story of a reckless young woman of the Swedish upper classes and her cat-and-mouse relationship with a male servant. Classic plays aren’t often made into classic films. Miss Julie , a Swedish film from 1951 directed by Alf Sjöberg, is one of the exceptions. Julie, played here by Anita Björk, is the a...

A dark comedy that stretches across the 20th century in Yugoslavia, Underground is a film of excess that laughs derisively at the colossal waste that is war. Among filmmakers of recent times who have had something important to say about the world predicament, a special place is held by Emir Kusturica, a Serbian writer and director who acts as witness to the tragic events and suffering in the Balka...

Hal Hartley’s 1990 film, with its desperate misfits and downbeat mood, turned the teen comedy genre on its head. It’s hard to believe that it’s been thirty years since Hal Hartley’s film Trust came out . At the time it looked like Hartley was going to be one of the greats. He never did quite fulfill that promise. But his influence on independent film was significant. Trust tells the story of a hig...

A film of psychological tension and bitter humor, Joseph Losey’s The Servant portrays a butler (Dirk Bogarde) gradually turning the tables on his callow young master (James Fox). American director Joseph Losey was well on the way to success in Hollywood when he found himself blacklisted during the anti-communist witch hunts of the early 1950s. We’ll never know what kind of career he might have had...

One of Robert Mitchum’s last great roles was playing a down-on-his-luck hoodlum in this gritty 1973 crime film. There was an all-too brief renaissance in American film in the 1970s, when writers and directors were free to experiment with radically different styles and subjects. But even in this historical context, Peter Yates’ 1973 crime film The Friends of Eddie Coyle is unique. Robert Mitchum pl...

Carole Lombard hires a bum (William Powell) to act as butler for her crazy family, in one of the greatest and zaniest screwball comedies of the classic era. The screwball comedy was a special kind of a film that flourished in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s. It featured zany, no-holds-barred dialogue and complicated plots in which men and women sparred with each other using fiercely intelligent wit...

A classic of Soviet silent film tells of a mother who is radicalized after she naively betrays her revolutionary son to Czarist authorities. There are very few more poignant examples of world-historical irony in cinema than the Soviet silent film—the revolutionary hopes they expressed proved to be tragic illusions, but the works themselves remain deeply influential, and rightly so. Most American f...

The story of an affair between a young upper middle class woman (Isabelle Huppert) and a working class ex-convict (Gérard Depardieu) explores the contrast between a detached intellectual approach to life and a full physical engagement with it. Loulou, a 1980 film by French director Maurice Pialat, tells of an upper middle class woman named Nelly (played by Isabelle Huppert), who grows tired of her...

One of the gems among Alfred Hitchcock’s early British films, Sabotage tells of an enemy agent in 1930s England, and the tragic consequences of his actions for his unsuspecting wife. One of the recurring motifs in Alfred Hitchcock’s films concerns a woman who suspects a loved one of being a monster. In his 1936 film Sabotage , the woman, played by Sylvia Sidney, has married a foreigner named Verlo...

This one-of-a-kind Soviet film portrays the life of an 18th century Armenian poet not through narrative, but through a succession of brilliant symbolic tableaux. I’ve spoken on this show before about the Armenian-born Soviet filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov, who directed the groundbreaking film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in 1964. The unexpected international success of that film pushed him into pro...

The new millennium was launched in Chinese cinema by this 2000 film by Jia Zhangke, in which the story of a group of young musicians reveals the hollowness of the Chinese economic miracle. Jia Zhangke is mainland China’s most cutting-edge director, challenging that country’s official story of economic triumph with poetic and elliptical tales about ordinary people adrift in the stream of modern cha...

Polish director Andrzej Wajda examines the dashed hopes of postwar Poland in this story of a partisan fighter (Zbigniew Cybulski) caught between the ideals of the Communist movement and its sordid realities. Sometimes when I revisit a good film, I start to notice a few flaws which lower my regard for the movie a little bit. But that didn’t happen on a recent re-viewing of Ashes and Diamonds , the...

Orson Welles’ 1942 film portraying the decline of an aristocratic American family was marred by studio interference, but is still one of the great masterpieces of cinema. The Magnificent Ambersons , the first film Orson Welles made after Citizen Kane , has suffered from its reputation as something of a “lost” film. It is true that RKO cut 44 minutes from the picture, rearranged some scenes, and at...

Michael Powell’s 1948 drama, about a ballerina torn between love and career, is possibly the most visually beautiful ever made. If one were asked to name great British film directors, I’m sure that Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean would spring to mind immediately, and rightly so. But a third name that also exemplifies the best in British filmmaking, especially in the 1940s and 50s, is Michael Powel...

Hollywood loved making comedies about divorce, and Leo McCarey’s 1937 film, starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, was the best of the bunch. Recently I was asked to put together a list of my all-time favorite films—not a greatest films of all time list, but a list of movies that were special to me personally. In the process of doing this, I found out that a lot of them were comedies. I need laughte...

Emile de Antonio’s 1964 documentary about the Army-McCarthy hearings of ten years earlier, was one of the first directly political documentaries of any scope in the U.S. The 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings were among the first government hearings to be televised live, providing a spectacle rivaled only by the much later Watergate hearings. Ten years after this, in 1964, the maverick documentary filmma...

French director Jean Vigo, who died when he was only 29, became an inspiration for several generations of innovative filmmakers. Never has a filmmaker been so influential, with such a short career, as the French director Jean Vigo. With only three films to his name, Vigo, who died of tuberculosis in 1934, at the age of 29, became a major influence on young film artists in France and around the wor...

Judy Davis plays the notorious 19th century feminist author George Sand, during a period where she wooed the composer Frederic Chopin, in this sophisticated farce. Once in a while when I see the previews for a film, it gives me the wrong impression, and makes me decide to stay away. This is what happened to me back in 1991 with Impromptu , a film by James Lapine about the notorious and influential...

Jean Gabin plays a famous jewel thief hiding in the Casbah, a criminal neighborhood in Algiers, in this popular French film from 1937. For a brief time in the 1930s, there was a movement in French cinema called “poetic realism.” These films combined deeply romantic themes with a kind of melancholy fatalism, and in retrospect they seem to foreshadow the darkness that France would experience in the...

MGM’s star-studded 1932 film typifies classic Hollywood style. In what we now call the classic era of Hollywood film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) had more stars than any other studio. In 1932, as if to prove that fact, production chief Irving Thalberg put a whole bunch of them in one big movie called Grand Hotel . The result typifies the period of Hollywood glamour, and it ended up winning the Oscar...

Tarkovsky’s epic film uses the legend of Russia’s great icon painter to explore urgent questions of art, faith, and suffering. On any film buff’s short list of great Russian directors you’re bound to see the name of Andrei Tarkovsky, who directed seven brilliant and challenging films between 1961 and his death in 1986. After startling the world with his searing anti-war drama Ivan’s Childhood , Ta...

William Wyler’s 1936 adaptation of a Sinclair Lewis novel deals was unusual for Hollywood: a portrait of a rocky marriage in middle age. Dodsworth, a 1936 film directed by the great Hollywood filmmaker William Wyler, is an adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel of the same name. It’s a cut above the usual drama of the period because it’s so adult. Sidney Howard adapted his own stage version of the...

Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid thriller stars Gene Hackman as an obsessive surveillance expert struggling with his conscience. Since 9/11, the invasion of our privacy by the government’s national security apparatus, as well as by corporations, has become so alarming and pervasive that we might well forget this issue has been with us a lot longer than that, at least since the Cold War. In the 1970...

Vittorio De Sica’s groundbreaking 1946 film about the tribulations of two Italian street kids was one of the founding documents of the film movement known as “neorealism.” In 1946, Italian director Vittorio De Sica made a marvelous film called Shoeshine. It’s about two street urchins in Rome who make their living by shining shoes. Hanging out at the racetrack, they share a dream of owning their ow...

Francesco Rosi’s 1962 film uses the life of the titular Mafia bandit as a stepping-off point for an examination of postwar Sicilian history. A man lies dead in a courtyard of a Sicilian town. The police stand around the body, taking notes. The dead man is notorious criminal Salvatore Giuliano. Soon reporters arrive, clamoring for position, shooting photos. The cops struggle to keep them under cont...