Flicks with The Film Snob

Alain Resnais’ 1961 puzzle film explores the elusive nature of memory. Last Year at Marienbad, the 1961 film by famed French director Alain Resnais, was controversial from the very first moment it was screened. Many intelligent critics either loved it, or hated it. It deliberately defied all the narrative conventions of film that people were used to. And remarkably, this experiment has never been...

Fritz Lang brought his fatalistic style and themes to America in this 1937 film about a couple (Henry Fonda & Sylvia Sidney) on the run from the law. German director Fritz Lang was one of the great artists of silent film. Even those who don’t know much about movies before the sound era have probably at least heard about his science fiction epic Metropolis , from 1927. In his time he was more r...

A real case from the 1980s inspires this compelling thriller about a neo-Nazi group in Idaho, and the FBI agents that pursue them. With crime dramas, we’ve become used to filmmakers pulling out all the stops to make the stories as exciting and violent as possible. But there’s a movie out now, called The Order , directed by Justin Kurzel, that doesn’t try to do that, doesn’t indulge in any nonsense...

Viggo Mortensen upends our expectations of the western genre in this story of a French American pioneer woman (Vicky Krieps) who defies society’s attempts to control her. Years ago, one of my writing teachers taught me the difference between popular fiction and literary fiction. In popular fiction, we know what to expect, and we get exactly that. The main characters face obstacles, conflict, dange...

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith , a film by Fred Schepisi from 1978, is set in Australia at the end of the 19th century. It tells of a young native Australian, an aborigine as they were called, named Jimmie Blacksmith, who is chosen specially by a missionary and his wife to be raised and educated, because he is half-white, and thus according to them more likely to benefit from their civilization. O...

Jesse Eisenberg has an odd sense of humor. His latest film, his second as writer and director, is called A Real Pain , and the title doubles as serious statement and casual joke. Eisenberg plays a gentle introvert named David Kaplan, living in New York City with his wife and young son. He and his unmarried cousin and childhood friend Benjy Kaplan, played by Kieran Culkin, are going on a trip to Po...

French director Mia Hansen-Løve has become one of my favorite filmmakers. Her stories about “ordinary” life and relationships, and her style, are so relaxed and organic that the world inside her films seems completely natural, without artifice. I say it “seems,” even though of course there is a definite artistic method at work, but one that draws us comfortably into a movie as if it were home. Her...

The Seventh Seal was Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s seventeenth film, made in 1957, and it was the first to propel him to international fame. It’s easy to see why. A film of intense, dreamlike imagery, it surprised audiences with its conviction that religious and philosophical questions can be handled powerfully in a motion picture. Here’s the story. Surrounded by the ravages of the plague, a m...

A film of political intrigue dramatizes the tortuous process by which the cardinals of the Catholic Church choose a new Pope. Selecting a new Pope seems a ripe subject for drama because of the air of secrecy surrounding it. It’s not that the mechanics of the procedure are secret, but that the conclave of cardinals that vote on the matter is a sequestered event—no press or public allowed, and for g...

A documentary explores the many aspects of women’s health care in a Paris gynecological ward. The best documentaries go beyond our desire to be entertained by a subject, like the way something unfamiliar can be made to seem fascinating to a casual observer. A deeper dive brings us into closer contact with ourselves, affecting and often changing our perceptions and feelings about our lives. Our Bod...

A Georgian woman searches for her runaway niece in Istanbul, in this tender love letter to transgender communities in Georgia and Turkey. Levan Akin is a Swedish director and screenwriter of Georgian ethnic origin. That is, his parents emigrated to Sweden from the Soviet republic of Georgia in the 1960s, before he was born. After doing some television and film set in Sweden, he started to explore...

This satire on the exaggerated standard of female beauty is a science fiction horror film in which a new kind of drug replaces an aging actress (Demi Moore) with a younger sexier version of herself. The Hollywood movie spectacle has been focused on fantasy, science fiction, and horror for a while now, with all the excitement and special effects this involves. I confess that I’ve put myself at arm’...

David Lean’s 1954 version of a play about a familial tyrant features one of Charles Laughton’s best roles. In 17th century England, a man named Hobson rented out horses to Cambridge students, but to make sure the best horses weren’t overworked, he gave the students a choice: take the horse nearest the stable door, or none at all. Somehow this entered into popular slang so that “Hobson’s choice” me...

A college professor moonlights as an undercover cop posing as a contract killer, in Richard Linklater’s genial spoof. Austin, Texas native Richard Linklater has managed to achieve remarkable success as a filmmaker while not compromising his independent views and methods. With a Linklater film you usually get a relaxed comic sensibility combined with intelligent witty dialogue. He doesn’t live near...

A unique kind of American immigrant, a woman that worked for the U.S. military as a translator in Afghanistan and now lives in exile, is the main character in the latest film from Iranian British director Babak Jalali. The movie is called Fremont . Fremont, California, is home to more Afghans than any other U.S. city. One of them is Donya, a young woman played by Anaita Wali Zada, living in an apa...

The epic story of a Siberian village, from before the Soviet revolution to the 1960s. I’ve long been interested in Russian film, including films from the Soviet era. But I’ve only recently begun to explore the work of one of the giants of Russian cinema, who is still with us at the age of 87—Andrey Konchalovsky. He started as a screenwriter in the ‘60s, then moved to directing. And he reached the...

In 1988, a British high school teacher faces the threat of being outed as a lesbian. When considering the progress of gay rights, it’s important to remember how long LGBT people have had to hide their sexual identities from family, employers, and government in order to avoid discrimination and persecution. The taboos have a persistent and damaging effect on people’s minds, and it would be a mistak...

Two young men on a vacation at the shore are surprised that there is a woman renting one of the rooms at their cottage. With each new film, Christian Petzold increases his stature as the foremost 21st century German director. His latest is called Afire . It’s a different kind of work for him, in that here Petzold turns a critical eye on the figure of the lonely artist, the kind of person employing...

A gang of women steal oil from Brazilian pipelines, refining it into gas to be sold on the black market. On a firelit night in an unnamed town, we see people taking oil from a tapped pipeline and pouring the stolen oil into containers. A gang of outlaws, primarily women, operate an illegal oil refinery in Brazil, in a favela, a slum near the city of Brasilia. Above the building is a flag that says...

A conflict develops in a West African village between the women devoted to the water goddess Mami Wata, and the men who condemn their practice as mere superstition. Mami Wata , a film by Nigerian writer-director C.J. “Fiery” Obasi, is subtitled “a West African folklore,” and it does explore the tension between ancient myth and the secular realism of the modern world. In the village of Iyi near the...

Edited footage from outtakes of an interview of Thelonious Monk reveal the contrast between the artist and the demands on his personal presentation. I’ve seen plenty of documentaries about musicians, some very good—usually you get a biography of the subject; interviews with friends, colleagues, and others; and of course performances. But there’s a movie I watched recently called Rewind & Play...

A young man plots to become a duke by killing everyone ahead of him in the line of succession, in this delightful comedy that features Alec Guinness in multiple roles. British film comedy came into its own in the years following the Second World War. Maybe the extremity of that experience caused something to shift. In any case, there was a new spirit of satire in movies, a flippant disregard for t...

An ex-con mother raises her son in Harlem after stealing him from a foster home. A woman is released from Rikers Island prison in New York in 1994 after doing time for a theft charge. Inez, played by Teyana Taylor, is a hair stylist trying to scrape by in Brooklyn. One day she sees a 6-year-old boy and approaches him. He is silent and reserved. It’s her son Terry, who entered a foster home when sh...

A man enjoys a life of solitude and labor cleaning public toilets in Tokyo. As the film Perfect Days begins, the morning light awakens a man named Hirayama, who sits quietly on his sleeping mat for a while before rolling it up, then brushes his teeth and shaves in his tiny bathroom, finally emerging from his home, smiling as he looks up at the sky. After getting a coffee from a vending machine in...

A drama about the evolution of a motorcycle group in the ’60s, from club to gang. Jeff Nichols’ films are known for their gritty working class flavor. His latest one, The Bikeriders , is based on a book of the same title by photographer Danny Lyon, about an actual motorcycle club in the Midwest during the 1960s that eventually turned into a gang. Nichols wrote the screenplay, which captures the in...