Flicks with The Film Snob

A young man with Down Syndrome resists society’s patronizing approach to his life and possibilities, by escaping from a nursing home and going on a journey with a headstrong, rebellious ally. A boy travels south on a raft with a runaway slave—that’s Huckleberry Finn . A new film takes that brief plot description as a template, while changing the characters, the time, the themes, and just about eve...

This stylish 1981 cult favorite from Jean-Jacques Beineix tells of a young man’s obsession with an opera singer, and his accidental involvement in a crime scandal. As the 1980s began, the French New Wave was just about over, and art cinema worldwide was trying hard to reinvent itself. Then along came a flashy little French film, ostensibly a crime picture, but younger feeling, quirkier, and more s...

A portrait of the immensely popular singer profiles Linda Ronstadt’s remarkable career, in which she succeeded in making her own choices that went against conventional wisdom, and the impact of her gorgeous voice. There’s a new documentary film about a popular singer who was born and raised in my current home town of Tucson, Arizona: Linda Ronstadt. The movie is called Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of...

Olivier Assayas portrays the complex and somewhat devious relationships of a group of Parisian literary types, in a film that poses questions about traditional culture, and the digital world that is threatening to supplant it. The latest offering from prolific French director Olivier Assayas bears the ironic title Non-Fiction , even though it is a fictional portrait of intertwined relationships. I...

Cate Blanchett shines in Richard Linklater’s adaptation of a popular novel about a brilliant, difficult woman having trouble adjusting to domestic life. One of the things you’ll notice about films that are directed by Richard Linklater is that the characters like to talk. They talk about themselves and their lives, but also about issues and ideas. Even his one “action” film, The Newton Boys , from...

This 1923 thrill comedy, climaxing in a famous climb up a skyscraper, shows silent comedian Harold Lloyd at his very best. There are three names considered the greatest and most important in American silent film comedy. Number one is Charlie Chaplin, one of the first superstars in modern history, whose beloved character of the little tramp delighted the world while symbolizing a kind of rebellion...

A Chinese-American family goes to China to visit the grandmother who is dying, but no one has told her the truth of her condition, in this tender comedy of grief and family. The premise of The Farewell, the second feature from writer/director Lulu Wang, is fairly simple. Billi, a young Chinese American woman, is told by her parents that her grandmother in China, whom she calls Nai Nai, has been di...

Jim Jarmusch has crafted a zombie film—a comedy that somehow manages to maintain an almost somber tone—doubling as a portrait of America under Trump. Jim Jarmusch still seems, at least to me, like the daring young innovator of independent film, even though he’s been writing and directing movies for almost forty years. He makes the films he wants to make, without compromise and without interference...

In 1913 Budapest, a young woman searches relentlessly for the secrets of her own family, in a film that dramatizes a premonition of the old European world’s collapse. How small an individual seems in the modern era—how insignificant seem the hopes and dreams of one person, dwarfed by gigantic events. By the modern era I mean the last century or so. There have been in that century two world wars—th...

Life on the job—in this case, the night shift at a supermarket box store—forms the background of German director Thomas Stuber’s gentle drama of love and friendship. Most of us spend close to half of our waking adult lives at work, but I would venture to guess that less than five percent of narrative films take work as their subject. And it’s easy to see why—we seek drama and excitement at the mov...

Ari Aster’s latest horror film depicts a group of young Americans encountering a strange pagan community in Sweden. In last year’s horror film stand-out Hereditary , director Ari Astor explored the darkness of an abusive family history. Now in his latest film, Midsommar , the horror takes place in full daylight, in a world of sunshine and flowers that is more sinister precisely because of the abse...

A young black man yearns to reclaim the old San Francisco house that he grew up in, but which his father lost, in this film about home, friendship, and the city by the Bay. A new film tells a beautiful, tender story about a house and a friendship. It’s director Joe Talbot’s first feature, entitled The Last Black Man in San Francisco. The tale concerns a young African American man named Jimmie Fail...

On this show I want to cover two films about people trying to do something no one else has done; both of them played in theaters during the past year, and only now that they are available through streaming and DVD have I had the chance to tell you about them. The first one is called The World Before Your Feet. Directed by Jeremy Workman, it introduces us to 37-year-old Matt Green, who decided to w...

A documentary tells of a couple’s struggle to create and maintain an organic farm that is totally in harmony with nature. It might just be because I’m a city boy at heart, but I think it’s very   difficult for a movie to make farming seem interesting. So I’m very impressed that a new film called The Biggest Little Farm manages to do just that. The director, John Chester, started out as a cinematog...

English director Joanna Hogg presents the pain of a young woman filmmaker’s destructive relationship with an addict in The Souvenir, while Pamela B. Green’s documentary Be Natural tells the fascinating story of one of cinema’s greatest pioneers, Alice Guy-Blaché. A feminist film, in my view, is a film that completely foregrounds the experience of women. This is the case with an extraordinary new p...

Chinese director Bi Gan explores guilt and memory through the mechanism of a dream; while Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre tells of a violent prison inmate who helps tame a wild horse. I’ve talked about what I call “difficult” films before, and how and why they are, or can be, worthwhile. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the latest film by Chinese writer-director Bi Gan, is an extreme example of this. I c...

Jacques Becker’s final film is an intensely focused drama about a seemingly impossible prison escape, based on real events. Four men sharing a cell in a Paris prison are planning a daring escape, when a fifth man (played by Marc Michel), in jail for attempted murder, is introduced into the cell. After learning to trust him, they draw him into their plan, which involves digging a hole and escaping...

Lionel Rogosin’s 1956 portrait of the Skid Row neighborhood in lower Manhattan was a startling new development in American cinema. On the Bowery is a fascinating documentary film from 1956, by Lionel Rogosin, examining the lives of destitute alcoholics living in the Bowery neighborhood on lower Manhattan, commonly known as “Skid Row.” Rogosin was a native New Yorker, the son of a wealthy philanthr...

A film about the love affair between the poet Emily Dickinson and her childhood friend Susan Gilbert gleefully satirizes the male-centric point of view on literary history. I find it remarkable, considering how little we really know about her, that we’ve seen two films about the American poet Emily Dickinson in the last couple of years. There was Terence Davies’ A Quiet Passion , a serious drama t...

In the early 1970s, at the peak of her powers and her success, Aretha Franklin decided that she wanted to make a gospel album, going back to the music with which she had first launched her singing career when she was a girl. She could have done it in a studio, but she wanted to record in a church, with an audience, because the response of a crowd adds so much to the beauty and intensity of a gospe...

Claire Denis, the French filmmaker, has established her international reputation over three decades as a director of art cinema: social dramas with a vast range of subject matter, from the politics of race, sex and class, to crime, colonialism, and the nature of love in the modern era. Now she’s made a science fiction film called High Life . And why not? At this point I’m convinced she can do anyt...

Elisabeth Moss dominates the screen as a crash-and-burn rock star in Alex Ross Perry’s latest provocative drama. That self-centeredness is often related to self-hatred is perhaps not an obvious truth, but it seems pretty evident in the case of a lot of actors, musicians, and other performers, since by necessity their art involves self-display. Writer-director Alex Ross Perry loves to explore these...

George Segal plays an American corporal whose wheeling and dealing makes him a kind of king within the narrow world of a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II. Prisoner of war movies: they’ve always been among my favorites. Grand Illusion, Stalag 17 , The Bridge on the River Kwai , The Great Escape : those are the most famous. But there’s one that is much lesser known, and in my opinion co...

Jia Zhanke’s saga of a woman finding the strength to survive after being abandoned by her small time gangster boyfriend, reflects the anxiety of rapid change in modern China. Jia Zhanke is a Chinese writer and director whose films have garnered steady critical acclaim since the 90s. Years ago I reviewed his 2000 film Platform on this show—since then he’s maintained a prolific output, producing man...

Jordan Peele’s horror film, about people encountering their murderous doubles, has a dark social critique underlying its frightful surface. Jordan Peele has followed up his smash hit debut Get Out with another horror film, this one with a much less comic flavor, simply called Us. The deceptively short title belies the writer-director’s complicated intent. The picture opens in the 1980s, with a lit...