Flicks with The Film Snob

A parody of a host of film genres displays Wes Anderson’s style at its most avant-garde. I’ve talked a lot about Wes Anderson over the years. In fact I’ve reviewed seven of his films on this show. I’m at the point where I want to just assume you know something about his work by now, and that I don’t have to keep describing his style and methods, such as sets that look like marvelous intricate toys...

A romance of 19th century France, in which a famous chef comes to rely on his female assistant to carry out his culinary ideas. Food films: movies that tell stories about cooking and eating, are a popular genre. When I think of the best ones, Babette’s Feast and Tampopo immediately come to mind. There are others. Now we can add The Taste of Things, from Vietnamese-French director Trần Anh Hùng, to...

A bold adaptation of a famous Czech novel about brutal conflict in 13th century Bohemia, and the struggle between power and innocence. Marketa Lazarová, the 1967 film by Czech writer-director František Vláčil, opens on a vast winter scene, wild horses running in the distance. A deep-voiced narrator says we are being told a series of stories that were assembled “almost at random.” We are plunged in...

Two young men are bonded as friends in a Florida juvenile detention camp in the Jim Crow South.  When filmmakers turn to historical subjects of oppression and persecution, it can be difficult to communicate the feeling of living through these events. Well, independent director RaMell Ross found a way to do this, in his adaptation of a 2019 Colson Whitehead novel about a Jim Crow era juvenile refor...

Gregory Peck plays a general assigned to toughen up an American aircraft bomber group in England during World War II. During World War II, Hollywood made a lot of war films. There were some good ones, and some not so good, but they were all presented in the spirit of patriotism that was a requirement during the fighting, and so almost every one of them could be called a “flag waver.” Nothing wrong...

Martin Scorsese’s 2019 documentary covers Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour from 1975, and Simon Weitzman’s recent doc presents the life and career of Tucson native and rock n’ roll tour manager Chris O’Dell. Bob Dylan’s 1975 “Rolling Thunder Revue” was a unique idea for a concert tour. Dylan and his band at the time (which included the violinist Scarlet Rivera) were the headliners. Joan Baez...

Song Without a Name , the feature debut, from 2019, of Peruvian director Melina León, starts in 1988, with newspaper headlines describing Peru’s financial collapse and the catastrophic inflation that followed. This was a time of conflict between the government and a Maoist terror group called The Shining Path. In a small cabin within a stark mountain vastness, a fire blazing, a group of native peo...

In August of 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono performed in a concert at Madison Square Garden. This was a benefit for mentally disabled people, in response to a recent TV program that had exposed neglect and abuse of patients at the Willowbrook hospital in Staten Island. Well, as it turned out, this was the only full-length concert that John Lennon would do in the years after the Beatles disbanded....

Lest anyone think that our current government’s practice of pulling people off the street or out of their homes, and taking them to prisons from which they will never return, is a new idea, they should know that dictatorships have been doing this for quite a while. Military governments in 20th century Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, for instance, made this a regular practice, leaving a legacy of mou...

At the beginning of Close Your Eyes , the recent film by Spanish director Victor Erice, is a beautifully composed and acted opening scene, set at a country home outside of Paris in 1947. It’s a lovely estate called Triste Del Ray, which means “sadness of the king.” In a large ornate living room, a dying man, an old magisterial Jewish Spaniard played by José María Pou, is hiring a middle-aged Spani...

In 2022 in Iran, a young woman named Mahsa Amini was arrested for wearing her head scarf, or hijab, too loosely for the Islamic State’s laws on women’s dress. Protests erupted when she died mysteriously in custody. We know that the widespread demonstrations rocked the country for a year before being brutally put down by the government, but all information was censored. Mohammad Rasoulof, the dissi...

American director Steven Soderbergh has nothing left to prove. He’s been making good movies for 36 years, many of them profitable, from independent art films to big studio releases. He got an Oscar, and an Emmy, and widespread critical acclaim. He even retired at one point, and then changed his mind. One of his special skills is that he makes really interesting art films, but then to pay for them...

Jean-Pierre Melville, a French director who loved America and its cinema so much that he changed his last name to that of the author of “Moby Dick,” wanted to do a light-hearted crime film, and with the help of Auguste Le Breton, a writer specializing in heist movies, made, in 1956, Bob Le Flambeur , which roughly translated means Bob the Gambler . The financial and critical success of this pictur...

No Other Land , a film about the Palestinian struggle against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, has been met with worldwide critical acclaim, multiple film festival awards, and finally the Academy Award for best documentary feature. And yet no mainstream distributor in the U.S. was willing to take it on, a fact that should sound an alarm about political pressure in the film industry. It’s fina...

The painful struggle of refugees seeking a better life is urgently depicted in Agnieszka Holland’s film about migrants trapped in the thick forest on the border between Poland and Belarus. The versatile Polish director and screenwriter Agnieszka Holland has been a filmmaker for almost 55 years. She’s continued to be a presence in world cinema, but I admit I didn’t expect her to make her greatest f...

Radu Jude’s film about a young rebel in Romania’s gig economy is a provocative satire on the degraded state of modern society. For the last two decades, whenever we needed films confronting the urgent predicaments of our century—abrasive, fearless, uncompromising films—Romanian cinema has delivered them. It seems perhaps that the chaotic social landscape emerging after the overthrow of a dictator...

Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando is the template for this many-layered exploration of nonbinary and transgender experience. Paul B. Preciado is a Spanish author, philosopher, and transgender man, whose work includes studies of identity, sexuality, and feminism. But when a small French film company suggested he participate in a movie about his own complicated history as a nonbinary and trans per...

Every year I make a list, like most film critics, of my favorite movies from the previous year. I do mine later than just about everyone, because I want the quality films released at the end of the calendar year to have time to make it to my home city. I also need to add that in this age of streaming, the recent foreign language films I’ve watched don’t always officially fall within that calendar....

Many years ago, I sought out The Baker’s Wife , a comedy from 1938 by Marcel Pagnol, because I read that Orson Welles at one time named it his favorite film. I rented a rather worn VHS copy, and I remember enjoying it and being pleasantly surprised that Welles would love a movie so different in temperament from his own work. It was simple, theatrical in structure, no razzmatazz. Well, I’d long for...

One summer in the life of a woman in an “alternative” lifestyle, and her relationship with her introverted 11-year-old daughter. The title of renowned playwright Annie Baker’s first film as a director, Janet Planet, comes from the name of an acupuncture office run by Janet (Julianne Nicholson), a 40-something single mother, somewhere in the hippie section of New England. Alternative lifestyle char...

The Brutalist is not about brutalist architecture or the school that created it. Yes, the main character is an architect, and his work appears to be in that style, but for Brady Corbet, the director, and his co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold, brutalism is a metaphor for American postwar society. The architect, László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody, is a Hungarian Jew who survives Buchenwald and goes to...

A bold documentary, framed against the jazz of 1959-60, tells how the U.S. helped subvert the government of Congo after independence. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a feat of radical mixed media, put together by Belgian director Johan Grimonprez, documenting the world situation in the 1950s Cold War and how it led to the overthrow of the newly formed government of the Congo and the assassination o...

A portrait of three women working at a Mumbai hospital pays tribute to all the struggling people in the great city. In a big city, our stories can seem to disappear into the enormity of urban life. All We Imagine as Light , the award-winning new film by Payal Kapadia, takes place in Mumbai, the seventh most populous city on earth. In voice-over we hear various migrants, in many different Indian la...

A man is mistaken for a contract killer, and the ensuing disaster is ripe for dark comedy. Mayhem can be fun. In a movie, I mean, not in real life. There’s a subgenre of crime films in which hapless characters get involved in some kind of crooked business that spins out of control, with multiple unforeseen consequences. These stories can be very funny if done right, and also fascinating, in the se...

A meditation on being in the present moment shows a young man on a weekend before going home from Brussels to Romania, poised between past and future. Here , a film by Bas Devos, sort of crept up on me unawares. The title is spelled H-e-r-e, and right away that’s a bit confusing because there’s a different film with the same name this year starring Tom Hanks. Anyway, I don’t think we’re ever expli...