Flicks with The Film Snob

Ruben Östlund’s satire on the ruling class takes us on a luxury cruise headed for disaster. Satire is hard to do well. But Swedish director Ruben Östlund has proven to be a deft practitioner of the satiric art. His breakthrough fifth feature, 2014’s Force Majeure , poked fun at modern middle class illusions concerning masculinity and the family. The Square , from 2017, took aim at modern art and i...

Brendan Fraser plays a morbidly obese teacher who is facing imminent death while trying to reconcile with his angry teenage daughter. For those who might not appreciate nuance, The Whale could seem like a misleading title. Charlie, the main character played by Brendan Fraser, is a morbidly obese English teacher living in a small house in Idaho, confined both by his enormous size and his deteriorat...

Fritz Lang’s 1931 crime picture remains one of the greatest depictions of social rot ever put on film. Once in awhile I get asked what are my favorite films, or my top ten greatest movies, and so forth. My lists have changed over time, but there are certain films that have always been on it. One of these has an unusual title, and I often get puzzled looks because people aren’t familiar with it. Fr...

Martin McDonagh returns to Ireland for this tale of contagious madness between two friends falling out. Martin McDonagh made his name as a playwright, with dramas set largely in rural west Ireland and featuring his own special brand of dark humor. The isolation and peculiar habits of his characters throw light on the conflicts and absurdities that motivate people to do crazy and destructive things...

Two films examine the plight of migrants, the first about seeking asylum, the second about the danger of going missing or getting killed. Ours is an age of migrants, those martyred by the legal fictions we call borders. Two recent films explore this persistent, troubling experience. Flee is from a very small genre, that of an animated documentary for adults. It presents the true account of an Afgh...

Frank Capra’s parable about goodness versus the tyranny of profit bombed on its original release, but then gradually gained classic status with later audiences. Among the handful of older films that are generally considered classic Christmas movies, It’s a Wonderful Life is quite different. Yes, the last fourth or so of the movie takes place during Christmas, and there’s a Christmas tree and some...

Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s provocative 1985 novel satirizes the stressful chaos and insanity of American life. White Noise, the latest film from director Noah Baumbach, is so different than what we’re used to seeing, that I was delighted, and a little surprised, that the audience I saw it with was able to accept its surreal style and laugh at its offbeat humor. It’s a comedy about...

A drama of a woman unjustly ostracized reveals deeper meanings, in a breakthrough work of Mexican cinema. María Candelaria, a 1943 film by Emilio Fernandez, is a prime example from what is considered the “golden age” of Mexican cinema. The title character, María (played by Dolores del Rio), a young Indian peasant living in the river country of Xochimilco, has been ostracized by her village because...

An 11-year-old girl spends vacation with her divorced dad, in a film about memory and love from Scottish director Charlotte Wells. The painful struggles between parents and children are often a subject of drama, and no surprise, given the plentiful examples of this theme in human experience. What is rare and more difficult is the depiction of a strong emotional bond between a kid and a parent, and...

Howard Hawks’ classic 1946 crime film stars Humphrey Bogart as hard-boiled L.A. detective Philip Marlowe, trying to solve one of the most complicated mysteries ever made. It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been doing this show for 17 years, and yet I haven’t talked about one of my favorite movies, The Big Sleep , until now. I’m referring to the 1946 Howard Hawks film starring Humphrey Bogart an...

A homicide detective becomes romantically obsessed with a woman suspected of killing her husband, in this stylish mystery from Park Chan-wook. The cinematic world is abuzz with praise for the latest film from Korean director Park Chan-wook entitled Decision to Leave . Park is already well known for his daring movies treating themes of horror and violence, most famously The Handmaiden , and Oldboy...

The endlessly cyclical nature of life is depicted as four different stories in a sleepy Italian village. Le Quattro Volte, a film from 2010 by Michelangelo Frammertino, is like a vision of an ancient world, although the story takes place in our century. I call it a story, but it has more of the quality of myth. The slow rhythm of daily life for an old goat herder in Calabria is conveyed superbly a...

Joanna Hogg continues her semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist, a young woman filmmaker in 1980s England exploring grief. The Souvenir: Part II is the name of the latest film from English director Joanna Hogg. When you release a Part II, the assumption is that we first need to see Part I. With The Godfather: Part II , to give a famous example, it was a pretty safe assumption given how succ...

A portrait of a creative genius, a conductor and composer played by Cate Blanchett, explores the dark and unacknowledged heartlessness behind the vigor and prestige of a famous artist. Tár is the name of a new film written and directed by Todd Field. The main character, Lydia Tár, is a prominent American classical music conductor and composer, played by Cate Blanchett. We meet her at the height of...

Terence Davies dramatizes the remarkable life of the World War One poet Siegfried Sassoon, weaving back and forth in time to show how much he and others like him lost because of war. For many modern historians, the First World War, from 1914-18, has a special significance, as the point at which an older version of civilization fell apart. In British thought and memory it sometimes has the characte...

A primal conflict between love and revenge is the theme of Mauritz Stiller’s great saga of Sweden from 1919. The silent era in Europe is still a largely unexplored treasure house of film, and among the foremost nations in cinema was Sweden, where for a brief time innovations there rivaled those taking place in America. The brilliant young Mauritz Stiller brought sophistication and technical master...

Inconsolable grief leads to resistance in a film from Lesotho combining mythic and political truth. This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. Like a myth or a folktale, the third feature film of Mosoto writer and director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese announces its meaning beforehand with its title. But woven into that one sentence—this is not a burial, it’s a resurrection—are many other complex meani...

A witty English drama from John Schlesinger about an unusual triangle: a man and a woman both in love with the same man. John Schlesinger was part of an exciting generation of young English directors that emerged in the 1960s. He established himself with several successful films, and this gave him the opportunity to break all the rules by making Midnight Cowboy , which became a huge hit. After thi...

The true story of one of the women in Kosovo whose husbands went missing in the war, who decides to step outside the role conservative society expects of her so that she can support herself and her family. For those who survive a war, the trauma never completely goes away. Hive , the debut feature of Kosovan writer and director Blerta Basholli, is set in a village in Kosovo in 2006, seven years af...

The classic Harlem Renaissance novel by Ella Larsen about the American delusion of race is beautifully adapted by Rebecca Hall. Passing is a remarkable film about what we used to call the color line, the distinction between races that has permeated American history. It is the debut of Rebecca Hall as director and writer, a gifted actress now going behind the camera. Passing is adapted by Hall from...

Javier Bardem shines in this dark satire about a glad-handing business owner threatened with scandal and controversy. We’ve all seen commercials, and we know how corporations and businesses promote not only their products but their image—stories that are basically about their own benevolence, with happy consumers served by happily dedicated workers making life better. And let’s face it, we all kno...

Alfred Hitchcock made this appeal to join the fight against Hitler a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now this film is valued for being one of the best thrillers of its time. There was a minor category of Hollywood films, made between Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in late ’41, that I’ve nicknamed “We Need to Enter the War” films. The American public was...

Claire Denis’ latest film explores one of her important themes: how desire in man-woman relationships is more complicated than we often assume. French filmmaker Claire Denis, whom I consider one of our greatest living directors, likes to play around with genre from time to time. Her latest picture is called Both Sides of the Blade , and if you read the ad copy it’s being called a love triangle. We...

Satyajit Ray’s debut film, from 1955, tells of a young boy and his family in a rural village in Bengal, and was the first Indian movie to gain worldwide attention. In the history of Indian film, there’s a dividing line between approximately the first forty years of the movie industry, and the release, in 1955, of the first film by Bengali writer and director Satyajit Ray. It’s called Pather Pancha...

A gripping drama based on real events that occurred during the Serbian attack on Bosnia in 1995 brings home to us the nightmare of modern war. The terror and helplessness of civilians caught in a genocidal war is a reality powerfully captured by Bosnian writer-director Jasmila Žbanić in her film Quo Vadis, Aida? “Quo vadis?” is a Latin phrase that became famous in Christian stories about persecuti...