Flicks with The Film Snob

Beautiful and extremely weird, November mixes Estonian folklore with an unflinching depiction of 19th century peasant life, to create a potent brew. I’d never seen a film from Estonia until recently, and now, judging from the one I just saw, a movie called November , directed by Rainer Sarnet, I would love to see more. Beautiful and extremely weird, November is adapted by Sarnet and Andrus Kiviråh...

Armando Iannucci’s dark comedy about the death of the infamous Soviet dictator, and the power struggle in the Kremlin that followed, is a fierce satire of authoritarianism and its consequences. The Death of Stalin is the latest satiric film from Armando Iannucci, whose previous film In the Loop , followed by the similarly themed HBO series Veep , took aim at the viciousness and immaturity of Briti...

Steven Soderbergh’s scary little genre piece features Claire Foy as a woman fleeing a stalker who gets tricked into committing herself to a mental hospital. Whip-smart and scary, yet seemingly off-the-cuff, Unsane is Steven Soderbergh’s latest contribution to genre film, in this case the suspense thriller genre. The title Unsane is of course a flippant variation on the word “insane,” and the write...

A daring debut film from Maysaloun Hamoud tells a story of Palestinian women living in Israel and defying conservative norms by choosing to live modern secular lifestyles. Young Palestinian women living in Tel Aviv are the protagonists of In Between , the debut feature film written and directed by Maysaloun Hamoud. The picture has understandably attracted attention because two of the characters ar...

Independent filmmaker Sally Potter offers a wickedly clever variation on the old “dinner party goes bad” genre. English writer-director Sally Potter is a rare talent, a feminist who is also a first-rate satirist, aiming her barbs not only at male dominance in politics and society, but at those ostensibly resisting that reality: radicals, intellectuals, and feminism itself. She’s been involved in d...

Coco is a highly enjoyable and creative animated film, a true celebration of family and the bonds of memory that unite us. Every critic has blind spots. I’m sure I have more than a few. The fact that it’s taken me this long to go see Coco , the latest feature from Disney’s Pixar studio, reflects my general indifference to mainstream animated films. Well, there were enough raves from people I respe...

The Wrong Box showcases a kind of inspired silliness exclusive to the British. There’s a special place in my heart for silly comedies. I realize I don’t review these kinds of movies on the show very often, and that’s partly because it’s hard to describe what makes them work, the truth being that they don’t always work for everybody. Well, the British seem to excel at this sort of thing—from early...

Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri presents an allegory of the trauma still being suffered in his home country from its 15-year civil war in the 1970s and 80s, as dramatized by a minor spat between two men that blows up into a major court case. The Insult is another provocative drama about the Middle East from Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri, who made a film a few years ago called The Attack , a contro...

2017 was a horrible year, but the year in film wasn’t too bad. Chris Dashiell names his favorite 2017 releases. It’s that time of year when I talk about my favorite films of the previous year, which as you may remember, is a later time than most film critics because I wait a few weeks for some of the year-end movies to make it to a theater in my neck of the woods. And of course I use the word “fav...

Luca Guadagnino’s lovely film tells of the romance between a 17-year-old boy summering in 1983 Italy with his parents, and a 24-year-old American man staying with the family. Call Me by Your Name is a gay love story without the angst, struggle, campiness, social comment, or outright tragedy that we have come to expect from gay love stories. This, I think, is a sign of some progress, because by thi...

Paul Thomas Anderson’s second collaboration with Daniel Day-Lewis concerns a fictional English fashion designer in the 1950s whose routine isolation is challenged by a young woman he meets by chance. Many are indifferent to fashion, and I happen to be one of them. But I do recognize that for those who are interested, it can be a serious business, and with a lot of implications for how people see t...

Steven Spielberg tackles the story of The Washington Post’s decision to print The Pentagon Papers, and the odyssey of courage by its publisher, played by Meryl Streep. The Post, Steven Spielberg’s latest film, tells a complex and fascinating true life story—the decision by The Washington Post in 1971 to print The Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Defense Department study on the history of the Vietnam...

A film by Dee Rees bravely explores the plight of two families, white and black, trying to scrape a living from a Mississippi cotton farm and embroiled in the racial violence and oppression endemic to the 1940s. Mudbound tells the stories of people who don’t often get their stories told: poor white farmers and black sharecroppers in the South during the 1940s. Directed by Dee Rees, and adapted by...

The sequel to the 1982 science fiction classic does not come near it in beauty, but the integrity of its vision makes it worth your time. This last year saw the release of Blade Runner 2049 , a sequel to the 1982 science fiction classic Blade Runner . It’s rather unusual for a sequel to come out 35 years after the original, but this story has an unusual history all around. Based on a Philip K. Dic...

Gary Oldman turns in a career topping performance as the embattled Prime Minister Winston Churchill, trying to salvage the United Kingdom from defeat by Hitler in the first months of his term. There have been three films this year featuring the rescue of British troops from Dunkirk, and two about Winston Churchill. I’m not sure why this would be, but I do think there’s a need to look back fondly o...

The great Agnes Varda collaborates with photographer JR on a project in which they travel around rural France taking pictures of people, blowing them up to a huge size, and then pasting them up on city walls and other public spaces. The French director Agnès Varda has been making films for over sixty years, in both fiction and non-fiction form, and she has truly become one of the great figures in...

A mother seeking justice for her murdered daughter causes a stir when she puts up three billboards berating the local police for failing to find the killer. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. I have to admit I kind of admire the courage it took for a producer to approve such an awkward title for a mainstream Hollywood film. Of course, this isn’t a blockbuster, but a bid for a more sophisti...

This brilliant portrait of small town intrigue was made in France under German occupation, and its subtle tone of resistance gives its Christmas atmosphere a special poignance. Regular listeners to this show may be aware that I’m not a fan of most Christmas movies. Occasionally, though, I offer suggestions during the holiday season, and this year I discovered a really off-beat film that is not as...

A documentary by Brett Morgen pays full and fitting tribute to one of the world’s most remarkable individuals, Jane Goodall. Drawn from over 100 hours of footage from the National Geographic archives that was long believed to be lost, and featuring a gorgeous musical score by Philip Glass, Jane , a documentary by Brett Morgen, pays full and fitting tribute to one of the world’s most remarkable ind...

Greta Gerwig’s debut film stars Saoirse Ronan as a bright high school senior at a Sacramento Catholic high school who just wants to get out of town. The talented writer and actress Greta Gerwig proves that she can also excel in the director’s chair, in her debut film, Lady Bird . The film begins with a quote by Joan Didion: “Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas i...

Ruben Őstlund’s latest film savagely satirizes establishment complacency and self-regard, using the theme of modern art to reflect on the porous boundaries between civilization and barbarism. The surprise winner at the Cannes Film Festival this year was The Square , a provocative and disturbing satire from Swedish writer-director Ruben Őstlund. Őstlund made a splash a few years ago with an excelle...

Possibly the only comedy ever made about capital punishment, Luis García Berlanga’s 1963 masterpiece is a satire so brilliant that it flew under the radar of Franco-era Spanish censorship. There have been quite a few dramatic films on the theme of the death penalty, most of them making an eloquent case against it, and some of them really great—Krzysztof Kieslowki’s A Short Film About Killing and P...

Sean Baker’s glimpse into the life of a six-year-old living with her drifter mom in a cheap motel near Disney World in Orlando depicts poverty without a trace of condescension. Poverty breeds ignorance and crime, which in turn become excuses for society to ignore poverty. This is true, and it’s a good place to start thinking about public policy, but it doesn’t make for a good film. What’s missing...

Steven Soderbergh’s return to the big screen is a comedy heist film with a southern blue collar flavor. Steven Soderbergh, one of our best and most versatile directors, announced about four years ago that he was retiring from making movies and was going to focus on television from then on. Fortunately he changed his mind. His re-entry into the world of theatrical cinema is a clever and amusing hei...

Tom Cruise stars as a real-life pilot who got caught up and in the dangerous, but lucrative, business of running weapons and cocaine in and out of Latin America for the CIA in the 1980s. The 1980s now seems like a remote, long-gone era, which is an odd sensation for someone like me, who lived through them as an adult. And although any past American political history seems less bizarre in compariso...