Flicks with The Film Snob

Grigoriy Kozintsev’s epic version of Hamlet presents the tragedy through stark visual means. Many Russian artists have loved and celebrated Shakespeare. Grigoriy Kozintsev, one of the great directors of Soviet cinema, was among them. I had seen his King Lear, from 1971, and was impressed. But I recently watched his masterwork from 1964, seven years earlier: Hamlet. This time I’m more than just imp...

The story of a search for the body of a Vietnamese soldier killed during the war is set against the difficult lives of two young men working in a coal mine. Việt and Nam, the second feature film from Vietnamese director Trương Minh Quý, begins with two young men working in a coal mine. The conditions are wretched, their bodies are black with coal, and—as we soon discover—they love each other. Much...

Joachim Trier’s drama about two daughters confronted with the father who abandoned them uses acting as a symbol of the ways adult children navigate their families. The premise of Sentimental Value, the new movie by Norwegian director Joachim Trier, has a classic simplicity, similar to some of Ingmar Bergman’s films about families. Two sisters cope with their difficult father when he returns to the...

Jafar Panahi’s film about revenge and responsibility tells of a group of people who think they have found the man who tortured them in prison, but won’t take action until they’re certain about his identity. A film style that is deceptively simple with a profound effect—this is a rare and wonderful thing. Iranian director Jafar Panahi has a style like that, and never more than his recent film, winn...

A detective investigating a series of murders in rural China is confronted with his own instability. “Self-aware cinema” is a nickname, that I just made up, to describe a kind of film that uses its style, genre, and characters to symbolize meanings that go beyond and even subvert the movie’s linear narrative. Well, that definition proves how hard it is to speak clearly about this kind of film. The...

This 1947 film about a woman who moves into a house that is haunted by the ghost of a sea captain is a tender understated beauty. Somebody asked me recently if I had a “comfort film.” I’d never heard that phrase before. You might even think I would reject the concept, since my customary angle as a critic is to highlight challenging films that might even cause discomfort sometimes. But movies can p...

Guillermo del Toro’s epic reimagining of the Mary Shelley novel is a marvel of Gothic style. It was inevitable that Guillermo del Toro, with his love of fantasy, monsters, and everything Gothic, would create a version of Mary Shelley’s great novel Frankenstein. So of course he has, in a style of giant painterly excess that storms the heights of melodrama. What I’m saying is: it’s a thing of beauty...

The life of a family in the Italian Alps in 1944 is profoundly affected by the presence of a Sicilian deserter. Vermiglio, a new film by Italian director Maura Delpero, takes place in the village of the title, located in the Italian Alps near the Swiss border. The time is the winter of 1944, the last year of the Second World War in Italy. We meet a large family scraping out a living in this harsh...

Raoul Peck’s documentary explores the life and thought of George Orwell, and how his political insights are relevant today. Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has been a prominent creator of radical cinema for four decades. Most probably know him best as the director of I Am Not Your Negro, a 2016 documentary using the words of James Baldwin to describe structural racism in the U.S., which got an Oscar...

Terence Davies adapts Edith Wharton’s novel about the price of trying to fit in to wealthy New York society in the early 20th century. The English filmmaker Terence Davies died two years ago at the age of 78. He’s a director I always admired, and an artist that I think has gone underappreciated by general audiences. One of the films I wish more people knew about is his adaptation, from 2000, of Ed...

An aging former revolutionary must try to save his daughter from a racist colonel, in a satiric action film about the current American predicament. We’re living in a time when the news is stranger than fiction. What should filmmakers do in such times? Paul Thomas Anderson, one of our best film directors, has chosen to face this moment by combining the action film with satire. The result is his lat...

Young men compete in a punishing walking race for which there can only be one survivor, in an adaptation of a Stephen King allegory about male-dominated society. Stephen King, America’s most popular fiction writer, is an expert at writing books and stories that get adapted into films, the majority of which are horror. King’s excellence at horror I attribute, at least in part, to his frank recognit...

Edward Yang’s second feature, about a couple in crisis because of their different responses to changing conditions in Taipei, was a breakthrough for Taiwanese cinema. Taiwanese director Edward Yang showed a willingness to take risks in his short films, and in his first feature, That Day on the Beach, from 1983. Two years later, in 1985, he released Taipei Story, putting all his money into the proj...

A teacher at a rural middle school in Turkey is unjustly accused of impropriety by a girl student, but this crisis confronts him with his own lack of awareness. Over the past thirty years, Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been gaining stature as one of the world’s best living directors. His style features long takes, wide shots, and minimal camera movement. Lately, though, he’s been making...

A single mother whose kids were taken away tries to win them back, while she considers offering another child on the way for adoption. Earth Mama, from first-time filmmaker Savanah Leaf, tells the story of a young Black pregnant single mother in Oakland named Gia, and played by Tia Nomore. Successfully avoiding tiresome exposition, Leaf introduces us immediately into Gia’s world. First we witness...

A drama about the experiences of inmates participating in a theater program at the titular prison, featuring actual veterans of the program. Sing Sing, a film from director Greg Kwedar, is set, as you might expect, in the famous almost 200-year-old New York State prison thirty miles north of the city called Sing Sing, the name being a distorted version of a Native American name for that area. I’ve...

The true story of forbidden romance between the heir to the throne and a 17-year-old girl in 19th century Austria was brought to life in this classic film from 1936. Anatole Litvak was a Russian Jewish writer in the avant-garde theater of the early revolutionary period in the Soviet Union, eventually getting involved in the film industry there. He slipped out of the country in 1925, it’s not clear...

Two recent films explore new styles and meanings in the horror genre. I think it’s significant that in our current historical moment the most prevalent film genre is horror. It might have something to do with the scariest stuff these days not being in movies, but in the news. Well, there are plenty of routine formulaic horror films, but horror is also attracting new artists that have more on their...

Agnès Varda’s film essay on gleaning explores the many implications of this ancient practice. Gleaning—gathering food left on the fields after harvest—is an ancient tradition in Europe. In France, as we learn in the great Agnès Varda’s endearingly personal film from 2000, The Gleaners and I, gleaning is protected by law, although the laws vary in different provinces, and with different crops. Vard...

A young woman professor is challenged by the memory of a traumatic event. Sorry, Baby is the debut feature from 31-year-old Eva Victor, who is the writer, director, and star of this drama about persevering through traumatic events with honesty and humor. Victor plays Agnes, a newly promoted professor at a New England school who is visited by her best friend and former college roommate Lydie, playe...

A woman dying from cancer asks an old friend to be in the room next door when she takes her own life. The Room Next Door, the latest film from the grand artist of Spanish cinema, Pedro Almodóvar, is based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez that I have not read, but the story couldn’t be more well-suited to his style. Ingrid, a successful novelist, played by Julianne Moore, discovers that Martha, an old fr...

Charles Laughton’s only film as a director, from 1955, is the dark tale of a criminal (Robert Mitchum) pretending to be a preacher, who marries an unsuspecting woman (Shelley Winters) in order to find money that her deceased husband had hidden, and in the process terrorizes her and her two children. Charles Laughton was a renowned British actor who made it big in Hollywood, but someday wanted to d...

Documents the German occupation of Amsterdam from 1940 to 1945 by showing us many locations in the city as they appear today, while a narrator tells us what people and events from the Nazi period lived or took place in that location. Try to imagine your country being attacked, conquered, and then occupied by a hostile foreign power. It’s difficult unless you’ve been through it. The most prominent...

Raven Jackson’s debut feature shows the world of rural black Southern life through the eyes of a serious, sensitive girl. A black girl is being taught how to fish by her father. We see a close up of her hands turning the reel. “Not so fast,” he tells her. “Easy.” When she catches a fish she touches its scales with her fingers, feeling its curious texture. We see her face, with intense eyes, seriou...

A pub owner in a depressed town in northern England helps welcome Syrian refugees into the community. British director Ken Loach announced his retirement a couple years ago, at the age of 86. Like everything else in his remarkable career, this was a modest and well considered decision. With 26 feature films, plus numerous shorts and TV programs, he’s been an important presence in cinema for 60 yea...