Flicks with The Film Snob

Saint Frances tells of the friendship between an insecure young woman and the 6-year-old for which she is employed as a nanny, while The Invisible Man is a horror film recasting the H.G. Wells concept into a stalker narrative. Saint Frances, the debut feature film by Alex Thompson, written by and starring Kelly O’Sullivan, is not about the famous saint of Assisi. In this case, Frances is a six-yea...

Josef von Sternberg’s 1928 silent movie depicting the life of the destitute on the New York waterfront, is one of the great American films. I’m a devotee of silent films, which I love and collect, yet even I have to admit that, in many cases, one must make certain allowances in terms of the styles and conventions of the times in order to enjoy them. But that’s not at all the case for The Docks of...

Celine Sciamma’s remarkably intimate, elegant drama about the bonds between women explores the path of women artists, and how love is fostered when women see and acknowledge one another. A woman painter in an age (the 18th century) when such women were rare, is hired to paint a portrait of a countess’s daughter, who is living on a windswept island off the coast of Brittany. This is the premise of...

A visually enthralling documentary explores the potential benefits, on a planetary scale, of mushrooms. Mycology has been a relatively neglected subject over the years. It’s the study of mycelium, which is a term for the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of thread-like filaments that bear fruit in the form of mushrooms. A new movie, written by Mark Monroe, and directed by Louie Schwartzberg,...

Mati Diop’s first feature tells of a young woman in Senegal, grieving the loss of her lover who died at sea trying to migrate for a better life, and then finding herself challenged by what seems to be the presence of spirits. The central dramatic figure of our time is the migrant, whose shifting, uncertain, and perilous fate reflects that of our world. Atlantics , the first feature film by Mati Di...

Todd Haynes’ meticulous reconstruction of the case brought by a corporate lawyer, played by Mark Ruffalo, against the huge chemical company DuPont, is a devastating indictment of the power of big companies to avoid accountability. Dark Waters tells the story of Robert Bilott, a corporate lawyer with a Cincinnati firm that specialized in defending big chemical corporations against lawsuits. In what...

Jacques Feyder’s 1935 comedy, about the women of a Flemish town disarming an occupying Spanish army with wit and charm, embodies the lost ideals of an earlier time. In 1935, Hitler had been in power in Germany for two years. The rest of Europe desperately hoped that the disaster that was the Great War of 1914 to ‘18 would not be repeated. It was too horrible to contemplate, even though German rear...

Chris Dashiell talks about his favorites among the films he saw in 2019. Thinking back on 2019, preparing to put together a list of my favorite films from last year, I was struck more than ever by how my movie experiences were determined by the realities of film distribution. Reading other critics’ end of year pieces, I noticed many films on their lists that never played in my city, many that have...

Tells the true story of a death row inmate, played by Jamie Foxx, who fights his unjust conviction with the help of a young lawyer played by Michael B. Jordan. Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer, an African American, who founded the Equal Justice Initiative in 1989. The EJI provides legal assistance to prisoners on death row. Stevenson’s career expanded over the years to include involvement in a lot of c...

Adam Sandler is excellent as a New York gem dealer in trouble for gambling debts in this high octane drama from Josh and Bennie Safdie. I became a fan of the Safdie brothers, Josh and Benny, after I saw their previous film from a couple years ago, Good Time , which I reviewed on this show. Good Time covered a day or two in the life of a manic, risk-taking criminal played by Robert Pattinson. That...

Greta Gerwig’s beautiful new adaptation of the classic Louisa May Alcott novel plays with the book’s time sequence in order to emphasize the March sisters’ journey of self-realization. Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel Little Women has been adapted into movies quite a few times before now. The book has usually been relegated to the children’s section, or in more recent years the teen or YA section...

Terrence Malick returns to his position as one of the greatest living film directors in this true story of an Austrian farmer who refuses to take the oath of loyalty to Hitler or fight for Germany in World War II. Over the long career of director Terrence Malick, he’s developed a unique style all his own, featuring extensive voice-over narration accompanied by lyrical editing and camerawork, that...

A classic Christmas movie with a sense of humor and a conscience; and a clever murder mystery with comic elements. This time of year I’m often asked about what films I recommend to watch for the holiday and I have to say, “Sorry, I’m not really a fan of Christmas movies.” Then there’s an awkward silence. But, you know, I still get the question, so here’s one that’s probably not on the lists you us...

A black family in south Florida deals with hardship and regret, in this remarkably poetic drama by Trey Edward Shults. I just saw a film that touched me deeply, a movie playing at the multiplex for which I had not seen any ads or trailers. It’s about a fairly affluent African American family in south Florida, parents with a son and daughter, and some painful and dramatic things they go through. Th...

Noah Baumbach’s new film is actually a divorce story, in which the painful breaking up of a couple played by Scarlet Johansson and Adam Driver, is depicted with humor and some hard-earned wisdom. Noah Baumbach’s new film is called Marriage Story . As you might expect from a writer and director with a humorous and ironic view of life, the title is misleading. This is actually a divorce story, but i...

Martin Scorsese’s latest film depicts the Mafia, and its complicated history with Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, as a symbol of the corruption of America in the late 20th century. The Irishman is the latest film from the now legendary director Martin Scorsese. It reunites him with his favorite actor Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci, who did Raging Bull , Goodfellas , and Casino together. And on top...

Bong Joon Ho’s fiendishly clever new film takes aim at the issue of class, reflected in a tale of a family of criminals invading the home of a wealthy family in order to get ahead. A family of grifters finds its perfect mark in a wealthy but very gullible family in a roller-coaster ride of a film by Korean director Bong Joon Ho called Parasite . The Kim family—mother and father, teenage daughter a...

Edward Norton is the director and lead actor of this entertaining detective mystery set in 1950s Brooklyn, a story that features political corruption and family intrigue. Edward Norton has long been one of the most talented and versatile American film actors. Now he’s written his first screenplay and directed his second film, called Motherless Brooklyn . It’s adapted from a well-regarded 1999 crim...

In his latest and most personal film, Pedro Almodóvar contemplates aging, regret, the need to make films, and life as a gay man in Spain. Pedro Almodóvar, Spain’s great director, was once a rebel and provocateur. Now he’s practically an institution, but that doesn’t mean that he avoids controversy. His new feature film, the 22nd of his career, is kind of a “summing up” of his personal and artistic...

Keira Knightley plays Katharine Gun, a translator for British intelligence who leaked an email exposing corruption by the forces seeking to invade Iraq in 2003, in this gripping true story. In early 2003, when the George W. Bush administration was pushing for an invasion of Iraq, with the support of Britain’s government, headed by Tony Blair, a story broke in The Observer , a weekly British newspa...

Don McKellar’s dry comedy from 1998 examines the peculiar ways that people might cope when faced with the ultimate disaster: the end of planet Earth. The end of the world! Or, in what amounts to the same thing, at least for us, the end of the human race! Prior to the creation of the atomic bomb, no films on this subject were ever made, as far as I can tell. But in our nuclear age, it’s become prac...

Vince Gilligan presents an exciting follow-up to his popular TV series Breaking Bad, in which we learn the fate of Jesse, one of the main characters, played by Aaron Paul. Vince Gilligan is a producer, writer and director, working primarily in television. He’s the creator of Breaking Bad , a series that ran for five seasons on AMC, about a high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque named Walter...

Werner Herzog’s 1972 masterwork attacks the colonial mindset through the story of an insane Spanish conquistador searching for a lost city of gold in the Amazon rain forest. An expedition of Spanish conquistadors, exploring the Amazon jungles in search of the golden city of El Dorado, is overthrown in a mutiny by the power-hungry Don Lope de Aguirre, who drives the soldiers ever deeper into the fo...

Renée Zellweger gives a stunning performance as Judy Garland in the last year of her life, performing in London while suffering from the drug addiction that would eventually kill her. The utter exhaustion of an addict who was also a world famous singer and movie star—that is the tragic story of Judy , a film from English director Rupert Goold about the last year in the life of Judy Garland. It’s a...

Two documentaries about independent journalism: the first chronicles the life and career of the maverick opinion columnist Molly Ivins; the second celebrates a variety of reporters working outside the mainstream, all of whom have been inspired by the legendary investigative journalist I.F. Stone. Molly Ivins was a Texas journalist who gained fame for writing a popular syndicated opinion column in...