Flicks with The Film Snob

The yearning and frustrations of two teenage girls in 1950s New Zealand leads to tragedy, in this wildly expressive film based on an actual murder case. Before New Zealand director Peter Jackson became world famous for his Lord of the Rings trilogy, he had a cult following for directing a few horror and zombie films that featured wild special effects and stop-motion animation. Then in 1994, at age...

A Finnish woman on a Russian train is aggravated by the man with which she’s forced to share a compartment: an insensitive young tough guy with a chip on his shoulder. I recently took a trip on Amtrak that included staying in a sleeping car, and although there were practical reasons for this, my inner movie lover also wanted to experience first hand something like the train journeys I’ve loved wat...

Three films by Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass present wordless imagery and music to send a cosmic warning about civilization’s imbalance, exploitation, and destruction. The meanings that we access through works of art are not confined to the conscious intentions of the artists. This critical truth came to mind while watching The Qatsi Trilogy —three films directed by Godfrey Reggio, and scored by...

A spellbinding portrait of an elderly couple in crisis, the wife suffering from dementia, the husband unable to cope, in a film composed entirely in split screen. I felt many strong emotions while watching Vortex , the new film by Gaspar Noé, an Argentine director who lives and works in Paris. As far as what the movie is about, it seems fairly straightforward. An elderly married couple in Paris ex...

A splendid adaptation of Balzac’s great novel about a young poet becoming embroiled in the petty world of Paris journalism in the 1820s. Lost Illusions is an adaptation of a classic 19th century novel by Honoré de Balzac. The history of film is full of examples of great books that have failed to be made into good movies, so it’s an unexpected delight to see a movie that does justice to its source....

Artist and director Ulrike Ottinger presents her recollections of living and working in Paris in the 1960s. Paris Calligrammes : that’s not exactly a movie title that would pique everyone’s curiosity. It’s written and directed by an experimental visual artist and filmmaker named Ulrike Ottinger. I can assure you that she doesn’t take appealing to a mass audience into consideration. She makes films...

An experiment in how people will react to videos of Israeli army and settler interactions with Palestinians becomes a fascinating study challenging assumptions about viewers and their judgments about film and images. Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz made several award-winning documentaries before moving from Israel to Philadelphia four years ago. I remembered him from an interesting 2003 fi...

Guillermo del Toro adds his own Gothic sensibility to this thrilling new version of an old film noir. After winning the Best Picture Oscar in 2017 for The Shape of Water , Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro continues to challenge himself. Turning aside from his customary monster or supernatural-themed stories, he’s now made a crime film, a film noir as people often call it, Nightmare Alley . Hol...

An increasingly synthetic world creates the conditions for new human organs of unknown purpose to appear in the body, in David Cronenberg’s latest dystopian vision. David Cronenberg pioneered a certain type of horror movie that came to be called “body horror.” Throughout his career, in such films as The Brood , Videodrome , and The Fly , he’s told stories that involve invasion, mutation, and exper...

Three stories about chance and imagination, written and directed by the up and coming director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy . What an intriguing movie title! I can understand how the film’s writer and director, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, would be pleased with that translation. However, the literal meaning from the Japanese might give you a better idea of what the movie’s about: “Chance...

George Orwell’s dystopian novel was made into a great film in the year of its title: 1984. I’m guessing most of you have at least heard of George Orwell’s novel “1984.” It’s about a totalitarian state in the future, one of constant surveillance, in which critical thinking is a crime, and authority is represented by a dictator named Big Brother. An office worker in one of the ministries, Winston Sm...

The film version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical is a delightful expression of solidarity in a predominately Latino N.Y. neighborhood, with the group dancing especially enjoyable. Have you seen In the Heights? This is the sort of question I feel compelled to ask after I’ve watched a film I consider amazing, and possibly of wide appeal. In the Heights is an adaptation of the Broadway music...

Fritz Lang adapted the medieval German epic into this awe-inspiring two part spectacle, one of the great achievements of the silent film era. After the success of the massive two-part crime film Dr. Mabuse in 1922, Fritz Lang and screenwriter Thea von Harbou, now husband and wife, embarked on an even more ambitious project, an adaptation of the German national epic Die Nibelungen . Two years were...

Céline Sciamma’s fairy tale-like film, presented as matter of fact, presents the fulfillment of a little girl’s desire to know what her mother was like when she was a girl. French writer-director Céline Sciamma has followed up her big success from 2019, Portrait of a Lady on Fire , with a surprising story of childhood, called Petite Maman . Sometimes simplicity is a radical choice, and Sciamma, wh...

Victor Kossakovsky shows us the experience of farm animals without the mediation of human words and concepts, in a film that extends compassion to life other than our own. The amazing advancements in cinematic technology in recent decades include cameras and sound equipment that can give us sound and image close-up from a long distance, as well as small and portable devices for ground level shots....

A screenwriter couple’s stay on Ingmar Bergman’s home island of Fårö inspires an honest look at how women are represented in movies, in the latest thoughtful film from Mia Hansen-Løve. French director Mia Hansen-Løve is a real cinephile. She loves to think and talk about film history and the works of famous filmmakers. Although she’s partly of Danish heritage, she grew up in France. Even so, she’s...

Paul Thomas Anderson pays humorous tribute to the 1970s in southern California in this story of a teenage entrepreneur who falls for a clever young woman. The latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson shows the writer-director returning to a favorite place and time: southern California in the 1970s. Boogie Nights in ’97, and more recently, Inherent Vice in 2014, celebrated that unusual period in humor...

Todd Haynes tells the story of this influential New York rock band in the cinematic style of the man who discovered them: Andy Warhol. I’m always interested when a film about a favorite rock band comes out. The Velvet Underground , a documentary about the group that enjoyed brief but unprofitable fame in the 1960s, has the added advantage of coming from a favorite director, Todd Haynes. And, I was...

An evil eye changes the appearance of two young people in love so that they can’t recognize one another, in a film from the country of Georgia that reveals the world of myth and folklore underlying everyday life. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? This intriguing and ambiguous question is the title of a new film from Georgia (the country), in which complex levels of meaning are designed to co...

Bernard Shaw’s popular comedy, about a phonetics professor who makes a bet that he can turn a street person into a lady, was given near perfect form in a 1938 movie starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller. Bernard Shaw wrote over sixty plays in his long career, most of which were intended as provocations to the conventional wisdom of the time. Arguably his most popular play was Pygmalion , written...

A married woman visits three friends in the city, and we are inspired to consider what is the nature of happiness for women in a “man’s world.” An undesirable side-effect of watching lots of Hollywood movies is that we become used to films that try for big, splashy effects—blockbusters and self-important message films, full of noise and drama. We’re not used to smaller scale modest efforts; we hav...

The Harlem Cultural Festival was a music festival taking place in the same summer of 1969 as Woodstock, and its amazing line-up, and insight into how it happened, is finally presented, 52 years later. Movies about music festivals have a built-in appeal: if you like the kind of music featured, the festival film gives you a variety of different artists in that genre. The gold standard is still Monte...

Wes Anderson’s playful new film is presented as an issue of a Paris-based American magazine, with three stories about the eternal appeal of non-conformists. Wes Anderson has a style that is decidedly his own and no one else’s. Those of us who follow his work are familiar with his toy-like production design, bright colors, block-like movements and set ups, eccentric stories and characters, and obse...

A film from Norway about a young woman seeking fulfillment in relationships takes the conventions of romantic comedy and turns them over to reveal the male-centered trap underneath. The Worst Person in the World. Now, there’s a title that will get your attention. But this new film from Norwegian director Joachim Trier is named ironically. It’s not a portrait of an evil person at all, but of someon...

In this long crisis, it sometimes feels as if time has lost its meaning. Making a list, for example, of my favorite films of the year is much more difficult this time. Many pictures that were going to be released in 2020 were delayed, and so now, in addition to the 2021 films, there are the ones finally released from the year before. Too many good movies! Well, that’s a nice problem to have. As al...