Flicks with The Film Snob

American director Wes Anderson has crafted a film about the fictional process itself, through an elaborate evocation of 1950s America and its science fiction. Wes Anderson has a consistent style. It’s impossible to mistake it for someone else’s. But that doesn’t mean all his films are the same, or are based on the same idea. And in the case of his latest picture, Asteroid City , I think we’re seei...

This 1959 film starring Audrey Hepburn is a rare example of Hollywood taking the rigors and struggles of religious faith seriously. Religious stories go wrong in the movies so often, it’s enough to scare a filmmaker off the subject altogether. But one happy exception is The Nun’s Story from 1959, adapted from a best-seller by Kathryn Hulme, and directed by Fred Zinnemann. Audrey Hepburn plays Gabr...

A portrait of a normal seeming American family, with a subversive style revealing its inherent dysfunction. The Cathedral, the remarkable sophomore feature by Ricky D’Ambrose, is a subtle drama of an average-seeming extended middle class New Jersey family from the 1980s through the early 2000s. The central couple is Richard Damrosch, who owns a printing business, and his beautiful wife Lydia. They...

A hidden gem from 1973 tells of an alcoholic country singer’s much too complicated life. Often in discussions of that brief period in the early 1970s when there was the promise of a new kind of American film, it seems as if the same few famous names and movies come up: The Godfather, Chinatown, Nashville, and so forth. But perhaps more significant is that a film like Payday could be made, a 1973 p...

A family peach farm in Catalonia must face its end, in this gorgeous evocation of people’s bond with the land. Our connection to the land is one of the central facts of human existence. It’s also true that this connection is not felt so widely or strongly as it used to be, with urban environments growing ever more dominate. Now Spanish director Carla Simón presents a film exploring a family’s deep...

Mike Leigh’s comedy of lower middle class English characters became a template for much of his later work. Mike Leigh, the British writer and director, came on the scene in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s with a series of films portraying the ups and downs of lower middle class life in England. Perhaps the most representative is one from 1990 entitled Life Is Sweet . In the film we meet a weird famil...

The fictional account of a Chinese opera troupe covers, in epic and satiric style, the course of Chinese history from the 1920s through the 1970s. A friend once teased me, calling me “the boy who cried masterpiece,” because of my over-fondness for that word. But I’m going to use that word again, having recently watched the latest film from Chinese director Qiu Jiongjiong, called A New Old Play . I...

A group of young people plan to blow up an oil pipeline in Texas, in this climate activism thriller. How to Blow Up a Pipeline takes its title from a book by Andreas Malme. It’s not really a “how to” book, but argues that climate activists are going to have to do more than just demonstrate. They’re going to have to commit sabotage if they hope to help prevent the worst catastrophes ahead of us. Da...

The great director, known for his versatility, was an independent who jumped to whatever studio would hire him at the moment, never with a long-term contract. There’s a story that after a certain American movie critic spent some time in Paris in the late 50s reading and listening to the new breed of French film  critics, he sent a letter to a critic in the States asking, “Who the hell is Howard Ha...

The true story of a Japanese officer who stayed on a small Pacific island for thirty years, believing that the second World War was still going on. Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese officer stationed on Lubang, a small island in the Philippines, in 1944. In 1974, he was discovered to still be there, having stayed on that island for the past thirty years, continuing to believe that the war was still going...

The trial of a Senegalese immigrant to France for killing her own child brings up many issues for a French writer of Senegalese origin. Saint Omer is the first dramatic film by director Alice Diop, famous up until now in France as a director of documentaries. It’s inspired by Diop’s own experience, attending the trial of a woman in a town in northern France accused of killing her 15-month-old daug...

The dissident Iranian director Jafar Panahi blurs the line between fact and fiction in his film about a village near the country’s border with Turkey. In 2010, the Iranian government ruled that the director Jafar Panahi wouldn’t be allowed to make any more films. Now, even during periods of house arrest, Panahi has managed to cleverly get around the restrictions to continue making movies. His most...

The best introduction to the comedy of Jacques Tati is this 1953 film about an eccentric vacationer, M. Hulot, and his bizarre interactions with other guests at a seaside hotel. If I had to pick one filmmaker who was probably an alien from outer space, it would be Jacques Tati. In his movies, people are viewed as the most awkward and absurd creatures imaginable, like weird puppets that are made to...

Two young undocumented immigrants from Africa struggle to get by in Belgium, exploited at every turn, and with only each other for support. The Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, are Belgian filmmakers who’ve been making movies for 45 years. What makes their work distinct is the focus on ordinary, working and middle class characters facing ethical and other dilemmas that reflect problems peop...

Josef von Sternberg’s groundbreaking 1930 film showcases the conflict between social respectability and the temptations of sensuality in Weimar Germany. After failing to achieve much box office success in Hollywood, the Vienna-born director Josef von Sternberg went to Germany on the invitation of the famous actor Emil Jannings, with whom he had previously worked, to make a film from Heinrich Mann’...

Elegance Bratton’s autobiographical film dramatizes what it was like to be a gay Marine during “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” A young black man is rejected by his religious mother when she finds out he’s gay. She kicks him out, and he ends up homeless and living in shelters and on the streets. But then—he joins the Marines. That’s the story of The Inspection , the debut feature film written and directed...

Kurosawa’s 1954 epic adventure is a profound cinematic experience. There’s a sports metaphor I’ve heard used, in basketball mostly, when they say that a player is “in a zone.” Every shot seems to go in; whenever they touch the ball, something good happens. Well, there are some rare cases when I think a filmmaker gets into a zone, and everything the director tries seems to work and to further the a...

Vicky Krieps shines in her latest role, as a wife and mother who abandons her family for mysterious reasons. There’s a mystery at the heart of Hold Me Tight , the latest film from French director Mathieu Almaric, adapted by him from a play by Claudine Galéa. The story opens with Clarisse, a wife and mother played by Vicky Krieps, playing some kind of card game with a deck of Polaroid photos spread...

A 9-year-old girl is sent away from her abusive family to live with an older couple, who try to break through her fear and silence to let some love in. The Quiet Girl, from Irish director Colm Bairéad, is a quiet movie. It’s the story of Cáit, a nine-year-old Irish girl played by Catherine Clinch, who is painfully shy and withdrawn, only speaking when she’s spoken to. So quiet is she that other ki...

The life story of a donkey, and his experiences under different human owners, is depicted to expand our ideas of what subjective life is to include animal life. Humility and innocence are difficult to portray well in fiction or drama. The imperfection of human beings means that artists will more readily create believable bad characters than good ones. But in our hearts we believe in the good, most...

The story of the radical art photographer Nan Goldin, and how she led a movement against the Sackler family, the billionaires who pushed OxyContin. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. That’s the title of the new movie by Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. It starts with a basic framing story, a story of activism. We see Nan Goldin, one of the more famous American art photographers, s...

A mass incident of abuse by men in a religious community causes the women in that community to gather and talk, so they can decide what to do about it. Sarah Polley is a Canadian filmmaker, an actress who eventually moved behind the camera to direct. Her work includes four excellent feature films. And I think the best one is her latest, an intense feminist drama called Women Talking . In a rural r...

Chris Dashiell talks about his favorite films from the previous year. Every year it’s my difficult task to list my favorite films of the past year. And I’m always late, because it takes a couple months for me to catch up. 2022 was a fantastic year for movies, although I still take note of them within the blurry outlines of the pandemic, going back a couple of years. If we must have a theme, for me...

The latest magical realist epic from Alejandro G. Iñárritu portrays the inner life of a Mexican filmmaker, and the struggles he must go through for his art and his country. Alejandro G. Iñárritu doesn’t do anything by half measures. After conquering Hollywood and coming away with two Oscars, he has now made a film closer to his heart, an introspective portrait of the artist’s world, private and pu...

A documentary about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre not only explains the full story of the shameful attack on the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa that destroyed a prosperous Black community, but details the complex and inspiring history of African Americans in Oklahoma. In 2021, when for some time we’d been in the habit, as a culture, of looking back at historical milestones, a major event from 100...