Flicks with The Film Snob

Two biographical films tell the stories of two remarkable women: Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers; and Chavela Vargas, groundbreaking ranchera singer. Dolores, directed by Peter Bratt, profiles the activist and organizer Dolores Huerta, co-founder with Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers union. Of course, most people have heard of Chavez, but many don’t know about Huerta....

Harry Dean Stanton—that thin, quiet man with the sad eyes and haggard face, and one of the great character actors in American film—died last month at the age of 91. He had appeared in supporting roles in moves and television since the 1950s. Many remember him as one of the crew members in Alien , or the dad in Pretty in Pink , but really there are too many examples to list. As an actor he combined...

Darren Aronofsky’s cosmic horror flick goes gleefully over the top in its symbolic depiction of the tragic historical situation of women. “Hell is other people.” That famous saying is from the play “No Exit” by Jean-Paul Sartre. It would also make a good tagline for Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, mother! mother! stars Jennifer Lawrence as a young woman living in a huge house in the country with h...

One of the great American satires on film, A Face in the Crowd was ahead of its time in pinpointing the dangerous intersection of politics and entertainment. In 1957, three years before Andy Griffith became everybody’s small town sheriff TV Dad, he made his film debut in a movie by Elia Kazan called A Face in the Crowd . And it was about as far from Mayberry as you could get. Patricia Neal plays M...

In The White Sheik , Fellini comments on the relationship between reality and illusion, while also satirizing movie making itself, its essential fakeness, but also its seductive charm. Among the films of Federico Fellini are a few that have achieved classic status, and deservedly so, such as La Strada , La Dolce Vita , and 8 ½. But hidden among these masterpieces are smaller and lesser known gems...

The Big Sick , based on the actual events surrounding comedian Kumail Nadjiana’s courtship of his wife Emily, is consistently funny. Actor and comedian Kumail Nadjiani and his wife Emily V. Gordon wrote a screenplay about their own very unusual courtship. With Michael Showalter directing, the film is called The Big Sick . It’s kind of a lame title—when filmmakers can’t think of what to call their...

Christopher Nolan dramatizes the spectacular escape of British troops from Dunkirk in 1940, in a film that emphasizes the brutality and terror of war. It looks like the big blockbuster of the summer is not a superhero or science fiction film, but, surprisingly, a movie set during World War II. Dunkirk , directed by Christopher Nolan, concerns the plight of the British expeditionary force, some 400...

Korean director Bong Joon-Ho presents a science fiction action adventure about a child’s bond with a super-pig, corporate greed, and the evils of factory farming. Okja is the latest film from Korean director Bong Joon-Ho. It’s created some controversy, which is not unusual for Bong, whose movies have always challenged the boundaries of genre and dramatic form. The Host , for instance, from 2006, t...

Hal Ashby’s film about two navy men assigned to escort a young sailor to the brig, is an example of how gritty, downbeat films could be made, and seen by a wide audience, in the 1970s. In that brief period of gritty, down-to-earth American filmmaking known as the early 1970s, new writers and directors sought to portray our national life without resorting to the populist clichés of traditional Holl...

Ken Loach’s latest film dramatizes the struggles of a man trying to navigate the inhumane bureaucracy of social services in England in order to receive benefits while he is out of work. At the beginning of Ken Loach’s latest film, I, Daniel Blake, the opening credits show against a black background while we overhear a telephone conversation between the title character, Daniel Blake, and a social w...

Gloria , a new film from Chile, seemed top be such a simple story that I thought “Why should I see this?” until I finally gave in, went to see it, and realized that its simplicity, and the seemingly ordinary life it portrays, is in fact amazingly rich and beautiful. Paulina Garcia plays the title character Gloria, a divorcee in her late 50s, with two grown children and a humdrum office job. She’s...

   The Saragossa Manuscript , a 1965 film from Poland directed by Wojciech Has, became something of a cult favorite among younger American moviegoers at the time, dovetailing with the psychedelic era of the late 60s. After five decades we can see that it’s more sophisticated than the original fan base might have led us to believe. Attempting to make a film from the huge novel, completed in 1814, b...

   Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad is no stranger to controversy. His 2008 film Paradise Now presented a sympathetic portrait of suicide bombers. His latest picture is called Omar , and like the previous one it was nominated for a foreign language film Oscar. While making clear the brutal realities of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, the film also explores issues of loyalty, commitment a...

A little miracle has come out of Georgia, the former Soviet republic. It’s a film called In Bloom, written by Nana Ekvtimishvili, and directed by her and Simon Gross. It tells of two 14-year-old girls living in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, in a time of poverty and great unrest. You’d have to know about the history of the region to pick up, from occasional conversations and snatches of TV news...

One of my favorite movies from recent years was A Separation , an Iranian film about the breaking apart of a family that ended up winning the foreign film Oscar, the first picture from that country to win an Academy Award. In cases of stunning success like this, I sometimes wonder if the filmmaker can follow it up. With his new film called The Past , writer/director Asghar Farhadi proves that he’s...

   The best film of 2013 may have been something I didn’t see, or didn’t even have a chance to see. There’s a wealth of great stuff being made, and a film snob’s duty is to take the time (and the trouble) to find it. But I can’t find or see everything. I was lucky in ‘13, because I saw quite a few films that I liked. Now, as I always do in February, allowing a month for Oscar bait and other end-of...

The difficulty of dealing with aging parents, and all the problems of growing old oneself—these can be painful subjects, and mainstream commercial movies generally don’t want to bring such things up. Alexander Payne, however, has chosen to do that in his new film Nebraska , and he deftly avoids sentimentality or wallowing in misery or on the other hand, going too far in the direction of humor. It’...

   That the great English author Charles Dickens had a mistress during the last dozen years of his life was a well-kept secret only revealed some seventy years after his death. The name of the mistress was Ellen Ternan, and a 1990 biography by Claire Tomalin called “The Invisible Woman” examined her story in more detail than had ever been done before. This book has now been adapted in fictional fo...

Fruitvale Station is movie that I meant to see when it played in the theaters earlier this year, but ended up not finding the time. Luckily, word of mouth kept it on my radar, so I just saw it on DVD. All I knew before was that it was about a young African-American named Oscar Grant who was shot by San Francisco Bay Area transit police a few years ago. And so I expected it to be melodramatic or ma...

Next Stop, Greenwich Village , a 1976 film written and directed by Paul Mazursky, is a finely observed autobiographical portrait of youth in its first stirrings of freedom. Aspiring actor Larry Lapinsky (played by Lenny Baker) leaves his Brooklyn home, and domineering mother (played by Shelley Winters), to live in the off-beat, interesting world of Greenwich Village in 1953. That’s mostly all ther...

   Dallas Buyers Club takes us back to the early period of the AIDS epidemic, when ignorance and homophobia stood in the way of progress in fighting the deadly disease. The screenplay, written by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, is loosely based on the story of Ron Woodruff, a Dallas man who contracted AIDS and then began smuggling unapproved but more effective pharmaceutical drugs into the countr...

Whenever we regard a period of history as an age of innocence, it tells more about our wishes in the present than it does about the age in question, which was always much less innocent than we think. It’s good to remember this, and not to let mythology about the past obscure the flawed humanity we all share. Inside Llewyn Davis , the latest film from the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, resurrects a...

John Sayles holds a unique place in American film. For over three decades, he’s written and directed smart independent films on his own terms, financing his work with occasional forays into Hollywood script doctoring. A Sayles film is centered on intelligent dialogue; diverse, well-rounded characters; and, usually, themes of social and political significance. The people in a Sayles film don’t live...

The best film version of Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations , I think almost everyone would agree, is David Lean’s 1946 film. It conveys the moody, Gothic air of this late work, especially with the early scenes in the fog and later at Miss Havisham’s old mansion, beautifully captured in Guy Green’s black and white photography. The casting is almost perfect as well, with Jean Simmons unforge...

   Gravity , directed by Alfonso Cuaron, steps away from the Star Trek / Star Wars type outer space film we’ve become used to, with their aliens and energy weapons and so forth, and goes back to the simplicity of human beings experiencing outer space. The breathtaking beauty of the film is combined with an eerie sense of desolation, the fear of dying out there and never coming back to earth. The s...