Flicks with The Film Snob

One of the more surprising recent developments in cinema for me has been the rise to fame of a Greek avant-garde filmmaker named Yorgos Lanthimos. His films satirize the darker aspects of human nature, usually in forms of ego and control, and they employ bizarre, sometimes alarming narrative devices. The gallows humor and the challenging depictions of sexual behavior, were not a liability in the a...

I’m not a fan of the Oscars, the Golden Globes, or most of the other Hollywood awards, but one thing I know: to win or even just be nominated helps an artist become much more well known. Lily Gladstone won a Globe and was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon , the first Native American actress to do either. She now stars in a film called Fancy Dance ....

Thelma , the debut feature from writer and director Josh Margolin, opens with the title character, a 93-year-old woman played by June Squibb, being taught by her grandson how to use email on her computer. Her difficulties learning such things as how to scroll down using a mouse, or what to do when an ad pops up, are a familiar source of humor, but instead of a broad farcical approach, it’s funny w...

A tale of a tomb robber in Italy depicts the struggle between the quest for riches and the need for love. In Greek mythology, a chimera was an imaginary monster combining the features of a lion, a goat, and a snake. But later, for some reason, it became a metaphor for foolish or delusional ideas and objectives. La Chimera , the new film by Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, tells of a young man wh...

A country village in Japan is threatened by a tourism company in this enigmatic film from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is an artist of the liminal—that place between perception and symbol that we experience as mystery. This makes his films difficult, because he refuses to break things down to an easily understandable linear pattern, preferring to let meanings arise at the...

A film mixing reality and fantasy expresses the spiritual struggles in modern Russian society. It’s not often that a movie manages to summarize the spiritual malaise of an entire nation, while using a kaleidoscopic hallucinatory style with shifting time periods and identities to scale the heights and plumb the depths of the human soul. I use such hyperbolic language because I find it otherwise too...

A classic film about lovers who are jewel thieves represents the height of style from director Ernst Lubitsch. A fortunate director can point to one picture in which all the elements came together to create something close to perfection. In the case of the great Ernst Lubitsch, the man who brought continental sophistication to Hollywood, that movie was Trouble in Paradise , released in 1932. It wa...

A birthday party for a dying man is seen through the eyes of his seven-year-old daughter, portraying her gradual recognition of the truth. Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés has made a major creative leap in her second film, Tótem . Her excellent debut, The Chambermaid , was focused on a day in the life of one isolated character, a housekeeping employee at a big hotel. Now, five years later, her...

Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic about the life of Pu Yi, China’s last emperor, is a biting depiction of the emptiness of power. The Last Emperor , a 1987 film from director Bernardo Bertolucci, who co-wrote the screenplay with Mark Peploe, tells the life story of Pu Yi, who ascended the throne of China in 1908 at the age of three, and was eventually deposed. It’s told in flashbacks during his detention...

An indigenous Chilean is forced to accompany two white men massacring native people in Tierra del Fuego to make room for business and settlements. The time is 1901, the place is Chile. A group of peons are putting up a fence in the middle of a fierce wind. One of the workers falls to the ground, unable to continue because of a bad arm. A man on horseback wearing the red coat of a British soldier c...

Frank Borzage’s 1927 romance was a major success and reflected a popular sense of spiritual loss still evoked by the First World War. If you want to experience Hollywood silent melodrama at its most refined, I suggest you watch Seventh Heaven , the 1927 film by Frank Borzage. Borzage was one of the most important directors of that era, making over fifty silent films that are cited by other directo...

An immersive documentary shows the daily events in a series of Paris hospitals, along with incredible footage of microscopic surgeries. De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a movie whose hard-to-remember Latin title seems designed not to attract viewers, is a fascinating documentary by Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel. They got the world’s attention in 2012 with their film Leviathan . Leviathan...

A mystery from Argentina becomes a meditation on love, art, and the agency of women. Trenque Lauquen, a film by Argentine director Laura Citarella, presents a two-part mystery. First, the mystery of things we investigate to learn more about them. Second, the mystery of things that are beyond what we can fully know. The story takes place in and around Trenque Lauquen, a small city in central Argent...

The two most famous film versions of Victor Hugo’s novel featured Lon Chaney in 1923, and Charles Laughton in 1939. In 1831, Victor Hugo wrote one of his most popular novels, “Notre-Dame de Paris.” In English translation it was renamed The Hunchback of Notre Dame , after its main character, a deformed bell ringer at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in 15th-century Paris named Quasimodo. The story tells...

A satire about a Black literary novelist who publishes a trashy book under a pseudonym to mock the way African Americans are depicted, only to see the book become a best seller. American Fiction is, on the surface, a film satire on how African American stories are marketed by the publishing industry. But more than that, it’s about the representation of race in popular culture, and how Black Americ...

Isabel Wilkerson wrote a book, published in 2020, called “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It argues that the core of social injustice is much deeper than racism: it is caste, defined as the creation of “superior” and “inferior” groups, with the former dominating the latter. It’s a complex argument not based on abstract theory, but on research into the historical evidence of caste worldwide...

A junior high school in Germany is a microcosm of society in The Teachers’ Lounge , a film directed by İlker Çatak, and written by Çatak and Johannes Duncker. There have been a series of thefts from teachers in the school, and administrators don’t have much to go on. When two kids on the student council are questioned, they cast suspicion on a boy of Turkish ethnicity. An administrative teams goes...

Women film directors are becoming increasingly prominent after decades of being effectively shut out of the profession. For the majority of movie history, the directors have been mostly men. In Hollywood’s silent era, women played key roles as screenwriters and editors, and in some cases, as directors. But after the studio system was developed in the sound era, when big business finally saw that t...

The story of a man repeatedly imprisoned in Germany for being gay, and his odd relationship to a straight drug addict. You probably know already that LGBT people were among the groups persecuted by Nazi Germany. After the war, the concentration camps ended, but sexual relations between men, as detailed in the German Criminal Code Paragraph 175, from 1871, was still a crime. Great Freedom , directe...

A 1999 film dramatized the real life story of a transgender man in a small Nebraska town, and it is still powerful and relevant today. In 1999, “transgender” wasn’t a well-known term, at least not in mainstream culture. That was the year a film called Boys Don’t Cry was released, directed by Kimberley Peirce, and written by Peirce and Andy Bienen. It dramatizes the real-life story of Teena Brandon...

The Film Snob names his favorite films of the past year. It was a good year for movies, if your viewing is not confined to Hollywood films. Many of the best reflected the unease of our times. Here is my annual “favorites” list: as I’ve explained before, I do this a couple of months later than most film critics because the quality pictures from late in the previous year take longer to get to my nec...

A Parisian woman who has survived a mass shooting feels compelled to remember the traumatic event that she has blocked out. Revoir Paris is the latest film from French director Alice Winocour. I’ve seen the title translated as Paris Memories , which, for many, might sound like a romance, but it’s far from that. The subject is trauma, or more precisely, the experience of having suffered severe trau...

The matter-of-fact depiction of the family life of the commandant of Auschwitz conveys our horrifying capacity of living with and condoning the greatest evil. The Zone of Interest is the name of the latest film by English writer and director Jonathan Glazer. It opens disconcertingly, with strange sounding vocal music against a blank dark gray screen. Then we meet a German-speaking family, parents...

In 1877, the owners of a Swiss clock and watch factory constantly time their employees’ performance, while the workers organize one of the first anarchist communes. Swiss filmmaker Cyril Schäublin has chosen one quiet moment in history to portray the early stages of the struggle between the industrial owner class and its employees, a moment in which the development of a new idea, anarchism, came i...

Two 12-year-olds with crushes on each other are separated when the girl’s family emigrates from South Korea to Canada. 24 years later, the boy, now an adult, travels to America to see her again. Past Lives is the debut feature from Korean-Canadian playwright Celine Song. In it, she draws on our experiences of career, romance, and the balancing act between a woman’s past in Korea, and present in Am...