Flicks with The Film Snob

Clouzot’s 1947 crime film is an apt portrait of the complex and difficult urban life in postwar France. Quai des Orfèvres was the third film by French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, released in 1947. Clouzot is best known for two films he made in the ‘50s, The Wages of Fear , and Diabolique , classics of suspense, and in the case of Diabolique , horror as well. Quai des Orfèvres gives us an early...

A drama about a boy’s troubles is presented from three different points of view, and we see how judgment from appearances prevents our understanding. For some time it’s been evident that Hirokazu Kore-eda has become one of the finest film directors, not only in Japan, but in the entire world. He may not get as much attention as others because he specializes in what we usually call domestic drama r...

Aki Kaurismäki continues his devotion to stories about lonely people looking for connection in this low-key drama about two working class people who almost don’t get together. Aki Kaurismäki has made 20 feature films in 42 years, plus about a dozen shorts, parts of anthologies, and music videos. With apologies to all the other filmmakers in Finland, he is clearly the most important Finnish directo...

The great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki comes out of retirement to present a fantasy adventure about a boy seeking to work through the loss of his mother. Hayao Miyazaki, Japan’s preeminent creator of animated films, the genius behind My Neighbor Totoro , Princess Mononoke , and Spirited Away , to name just a few, announced his retirement ten years ago, but thankfully the 82-year-old writer and...

The story of a paid assassin’s quest to get even with a client who tried to have him killed is a bracing satire on the modern culture of violence. The hit man. The professional assassin. How many such people actually exist? I’m going to say they’re a microscopic percentage of the population. Yet in popular fiction and film, this character has been reborn and remade countless times: first, naturall...

In the late 19th century, a Danish Lutheran priest is sent to Iceland to build a church, but the overwhelming power of nature threatens to destroy his plans. Godland is a film by the Icelandic writer and director Hlynur Pálmason. The original title in the Icelandic language indicates that the land has been corrupted in a cosmic sense—the English title Godland makes a finer point, that the God of t...

Tom Hardy portrays Britain’s most violent prison inmate, a man who refuses to cooperate. Bronson, the film from 2008 directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, is based on the life of an actual criminal named Michael Peterson, who gained a reputation as Britain’s most violent prison inmate, spending three decades in solitary confinement. During his last release on parole, he was employed as a bare-knuckle...

An actress studies a woman who was the subject of a scandal involving sex with an underage person, in order to play her in a movie. It’s hard to believe that American director Todd Haynes has been making films for over 35 years now—I still think of him as a daring new voice in movies, which I guess is an indicator of my age. He was part of the burgeoning New Queer cinema, as it was called, in the...

The guests at a wealthy dinner party find themselves unable to leave the premises, in Luis Buñuel’s satiric fable. Spanish director Luis Buñuel went into exile from his native land after Franco’s military coup in 1936. He went to Hollywood and managed to scrape by translating and supervising the dubbing of Latin American films there. Eventually he found a more congenial environment in Mexico, wher...

Martin Scorsese’s latest film dramatizes the true story of a series of murders in 1920s Oklahoma, in which the Osage Indians were targeted for wealth gained from oil being found on their land. Martin Scorsese has explored the darker side of humanity in many of his films. His journey into the problem of evil is darkest of all, I think, in his latest movie, Killers of the Flower Moon , based as it i...

The husband of a famous author falls to his death, and the wife is prosecuted for murder, in a film about the conflicting truths of intimate relationships. Film marketers and critics always try to fit a movie into a slot, a recognizable genre or type of narrative. That can be problematic. Anatomy of a Fall , the new film from French director Justine Triet, is being a called a thriller, but to take...

The great American singer and activist reveals the fear, insecurity, and private struggles of her inner life that lay behind her public persona. When the singer Joan Baez was planning a farewell tour in 2019, after a career spanning sixty years, she gave the green light to a documentary to be made about her by three women filmmakers: Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, and Karen O’Connor. Finally release...

A Jewish teenager dreams of acting and romance and the future, and she lives in Nazi-occupied Paris. A Radiant Girl, the first feature written and directed by the veteran French actress Sandrine Kiberlain, opens with a montage of student actors practicing a scene from a play by Marivaux. Then we focus on one actress, 19-year-old Irène, played by Rebecca Marder, practicing that scene with a young m...

Laurence Olivier’s 1948 version of Shakespeare’s great tragedy won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Actor. Laurence Olivier was one of the 20th century’s greatest Shakespearean actors. He also directed eight films in his career—the first three were versions of Shakespeare, and those are the ones that really made his reputation as a filmmaker. Henry the Fifth came out near the end of 1944, when Bri...

A man tries to reach his troubled son from a previous marriage, learning his own shortcomings as a father in the process. A couple of years ago, Florian Zeller directed a film version of a play that he co-wrote with Christopher Hampton called The Father . Anthony Hopkins won the Academy Award for Best Actor in that. Now, once again, Zeller has adapted for the screen another of his plays with the s...

Hong Sang-soo’s wry film about a novelist who decides to make a short movie is a clever illustration of the Korean filmmaker’s own narrative methods. I’ve had occasion before to praise the work of Korean writer and director Hong San-soo. He’s unusual in that he’s artistically modest (always doing small scale films about ordinary life) yet incredibly prolific (31 features in the last 27 years, incl...

A comedy from the inimitable Nicole Holofcener about the things we say to loved ones in order to support them that may not reflect what we really think or feel. You Hurt My Feelings is the satirically petulant sounding title of the latest comedy by writer-director Nicole Holofcener. Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars as a writer and teacher in New York City named Beth. She’s married to Don, a therapist pla...

Jean Renoir’s 1938 classic about prisoners in World War One was a plea for peace on the eve of yet another war. Here’s an Oscar trivia question. What was the first non-English language film to be nominated for Best Picture? The answer is Grand Illusion , a French film, in 1938. It was the first, and there wasn’t another for the next 31 years. Americans didn’t pay much attention to foreign language...

A single mother in Chad defies patriarchal authority to help her teenage daughter get an abortion. How far will a mother go to protect her daughter? Lingui , a film by writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, poses this question against a broader canvas of women’s struggles in the African country of Chad. We first meet Amina, a single mother scratching out a living near the outskirts of Chad’s capita...

An introverted sculptor (Michelle Williams) has trouble dealing with people while preparing for a show, in Kelly Reichardt’s amusing study of the relationship between art and ordinary life. Kelly Reichardt has been making movies for thirty years, and has gained steady critical acclaim. Most of her feature films take place in Oregon and tell stories of rural working people, and those on the margins...

Ari Aster’s disturbing drama about a man (Joaquin Phoenix) who is afraid of everything all the time, bursts through the limits of the horror genre. American director Ari Aster staked out a claim for being an artist of the horror genre in his first two features, Hereditary and Midsommar . With his third, called Beau Is Afraid , he’s pushed himself, and the audience, past the limits of the form. Is...

A charismatic but demanding gay man starts an affair with a woman, while trying to hang on to his husband. American director Ira Sachs makes films that explore relationships—of all kinds, although he’s well known as an important figure in gay cinema since the late 1990s. His latest picture is called Passages , and I think it’s his most remarkable yet. The word “passages” is a way to describe the l...

In 1931 and ’32, the gangster genre broke through in Hollywood with three great films: Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface. The gangster movie has been a durable genre, along with the western, one of the uniquely American film types. There had been such films in the silent era, but the early 1930s was when they suddenly took off. Three Hollywood films in particular, all made within rough...

An Iranian film tells four stories courageously exposing the effects of pervasive state violence on ordinary people. There Is No Evil , a film by Iranian writer and director Mohammad Rasoulof, consists of four separate stories, and if you come to the movie cold, it might be difficult to discover a connecting theme between them. In the first story, we watch an ordinary looking middle-aged man drive...

Christopher Nolan presents an account of Robert Oppenheimer’s career as the “father of the atomic bomb,” and the controversy surrounding him. J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American physicist who was assigned to be the head of the Manhattan Project, a team of scientists tasked with developing an atomic bomb during World War II. Once American intelligence knew that German scientists were working on c...