Flicks with The Film Snob

In the 1980s, during the cocaine epidemic, there was a treatment center boom and a rapid increase of membership in addiction recovery groups. At the very end of that decade, a rising new talent, Gus Van Sant, made a brilliant film that defied the usual approach to how addicts are portrayed: from 1989, it’s Drug Store Cowboy. Matt Dillon plays Bob Hughes, a drug dealer and junkie in his 20s driving an old Cadillac sedan around the Portland Oregon area robbing drugstores with a small crew, consisting of his wife Dianne, played by Kelly Lynch, his friend Rick (James LeGros) and…

A documentary about the career of journalist Seymour Hersh, who has broken some of the most important political stories in America since the late 1960s. Seymour Hersh, or “Sy” Hersh to his friends, is an investigative journalist active since 1959—starting in local Chicago newspapers, then going to UPI, and finally The New York Times, where he became famous after breaking the story of the My Lai massacre in 1969. He since became a freelancer and frequent contributor to The New Yorker magazine. Hersh took on some of the toughest news items involving U.S. government crimes, and particularly attempts to conceal those…

An older man, who wrote one book of poetry years ago and then stopped writing, is rediscovered by a group of young writers in New York City. Poetry used to be widely read. It was considered important. Now, when most people don’t read it, poets may justifiably feel nostalgic about the days when intellectuals gathered in Greenwich Village coffee houses and wrote poems. It’s been idealized, and in the new comedy-drama Late Fame, it’s a subject of wistful satire. Willem Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, an older man living in lower Manhattan who has worked at the post office for the past…

Akira Kurosawa adapted the famous play by Maxim Gorky about a group of outcasts typifying social conflict into a film of remarkable power. It had long been a dream of the director Akira Kurosawa to make a film adapting the great Maxim Gorky play “The Lower Depths” about the struggles of a group of destitute people living in a flophouse. It had been done before several times by other directors, but Kurosawa felt a strong connection with Russian literature. He’d already done a version of Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot,” and another of his films was inspired loosely by Tolstoy’s “The Death of…

U.S. early 20th century history is the context of this story of a hard-working logger in the northwest who has high hopes but must endure great loss. Train Dreams is an historical drama taking place in the forests of the northwest United States during the early 20th century. You might think that the story has to do with trains, and a small part of it does, but the title really symbolizes the painful creation of the modern world in America, born from the sweat and toil of poor working people just trying to survive. The film is directed by Clint Bentley…

An arrogant, pretentious 19-year-old takes a job as a cook in a Cape Cod restaurant and is forced to grow up. In the opening scene of Tony, a comedy from Canadian director Matt Johnson, we see the 19-year-old title character, played by Dominic Sessa, applying for a writing fellowship at Vassar College in New York in 1975. Tony projects a persona of brash self-confidence that doesn’t succeed in hiding his foolishness. He describes his proposed novel as a kind of bildungsroman, a word that he mispronounces, which basically means a coming-of-age story. Here we have a nice bit of irony, because…

A rediscovery of the great South African photographer who lived most of his life in exile in the U.S. Haitian director Raoul Peck has long been in the forefront of radical cinema. His recent documentaries include I Am Not Your Negro, the incisive portrait of James Baldwin from 2016, and Orwell: 2+2=5, which I reviewed last year. Right before the Orwell film he directed a portrait of another artist, not as famous as Baldwin, but a significant one: Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. Ernest Cole was a South African photographer who documented life under apartheid in the 1950s and early ’60s.…

A young woman oppressed by her controlling mother discovers her own strength when she is encouraged by a psychiatrist to go out into the world. In 1942, Bette Davis was Warner Brothers’ biggest star. She’d attained this status not through conventional beauty, but through her talent, hard work, and incredible dramatic range. Her filmography up to that time is basically a list of classics. And now at the height of her career, having already won two Best Actress Oscars, and four other nominations, she starred in one of the great romantic films of the era: Now, Voyager. She plays Charlotte Vale,…

A documentary details the murder trial of a landowner accused of killing an indigenous villager in Argentina, illuminating the long history of exploitation of native people in that country. Argentine writer-director Lucrecia Martel has long been exploring her country’s social tensions and contradictions in her dramatic films. Now in her latest film, she’s turned to documentary, in a project it’s taken her almost a decade to complete: Nuestra Tierra, Our Land. Just as in her fictional works, Our Land plunges us into its subject without explanation, and with no narrative voice, letting us figure out what’s going on by ourselves. A…

Two young fishermen take a job on a boat that has returned after disappearing for thirty years, in a film about the tragic paradoxes of time and mortality. In a mosaic of very brief shots—fragments really—we are shown an old stone and concrete quay above the seaside on a rainy day. A stout middle aged man sees a small boat in the dock below. There is no one on it. As he climbs in, there are close-ups of his face, his feet, the mottled surface of the stones, and a curious old name plate that says “Rose of Nevada.” Rose of…

Depicts one night in the life of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, when his partner Richard Rodgers premiers a new hit musical “Oklahoma!” done with a new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein. The Austin, Texas based director Richard Linklater is always trying new things. His latest movie is about the lyricist Lorenz Hart, who paired with composer Richard Rodgers to make 26 Broadway musicals in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, featuring many songs that became classics, including “My Funny Valentine;” “The Lady is a Tramp; “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and the one he’s made the title of the film: Blue Moon. Blue Moon’s smart,…

A Cold War thriller tells of an assassin hypnotized by the Chinese to kill a presidential candidate. A special brand of American movie emerged during the Cold War that I call the “paranoid thriller.” It started in the ‘50s as Hollywood’s way of exploiting the “Red Scare,” the fear and hatred of communism at home and abroad. As political events became more chaotic and disturbing in the ‘60s and ‘70s, these films began to reflect popular suspicion of U.S. government covert actions and conspiracies. Produced right on the cusp of these two phases was an amazing suspense film, from 1962: The…

A gritty crime film dramatizes a 2008 heist in Copenhagen, the biggest robbery in Danish history. The heist film is now a well-established genre. From the beginning, the stories have involved losers striving to become winners, underworld types who ultimately get tripped up by mistakes and by their own greed. Later, things became more light-hearted, even comic, as more or less glamorous crooks find ways to get around the system to make a big score. In either case, we usually find ourselves rooting for them to succeed, even against our better judgment. A recent film from Denmark called The Quiet Ones…

Two films employing the horror genre to explore darker truths about relationships between men and women. A recent sort of “new wave” movement in horror films is discarding old ideas that were based only on scaring you. I offer two examples. My first example is called Sleep. It’s the debut feature of Korean writer and director Jason Yu, telling of a young wife, played by Jung Yu-mi, who notices that her husband, played by Lee Sun-kyun, is having increasingly alarming sleepwalking episodes, at one point eating raw meat from the fridge and then trying to crawl out of an upstairs window.…

Wim Wenders’ 1976 movie about two guys traveling around West Germany is a portrait of a time still haunted by the dark legacy of the recent Nazi past. Kings of the Road, a film by Wim Wenders from 1976, opens with a startling event. Bruno, a traveling movie projector repairman played by Rüdiger Vogler, is shaving next to his parked van when he sees a Volkswagen zoom off the road and into the Elbe River at top speed. If this is a suicide attempt, it’s a failure, because the car floats, and its driver, Robert (Hanns Zischler) sheepishly wades to shore.…

Sepideh Farsi’s intimate documentary shows the friendship she developed with a young Palestinian woman in Gaza during Israel’s invasion. Trying to describe the suffering of civilians in war tends to fall short—because abstractions, statistics, and an overview of generalities, creates distance in our minds, despite the degree of accuracy in reporting. We are individuals, and all human experience is such. Therefore we must see events on that level, and imagine being a person in the midst of all this, to genuinely understand. Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi gives us access to that experience, in a documentary about her friendship with a young…

A rec league baseball game conveys a gently humorous truth about American men trying to hold on to the rituals of their younger days. On a Sunday afternoon in a small New England town, sometime in the 1990s, two amateur baseball teams play one last game on a field that will soon have to make way for a new school. They are what you call “rec” teams, short for recreational, that play for fun and allow any local adult male to join who wants to be a part. The two teams in this game are Atlas Paint, in red, and The…

Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s final film is a metafictional journey through the world of Japanese war movies, and their relationship to the actual horrors of war. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi is famous in the West mainly for his film House, from 1977, which so far I know only by reputation as a wild, playful, and surrealist ride through the horror genre. But he’s directed over seventy films that are largely considered eccentric and avant-garde. I started watching his final film, from 2019, Labyrinth of Cinema without realizing any of this, purely on word of mouth. Labyrinth of Cinema begins with a mysterious old hipster in…

A man discovers a vast network of empty rooms and hallways, in a film about the dangers of the unconscious. I just watched a weird and genuinely creepy film, currently getting a lot of attention, called Backrooms. One of the unusual aspects of this movie is that the plot, such at is, is secondary to the visual and auditory experience. A disorienting opening sequence takes the fuzzy point of view of a video camera being used by an unnamed traveler in a series of nondescript, mostly empty rooms. Why this traveler is there we don’t know, but he wants out,…

A young photographer insinuates himself into the entourage surrounding an up-and-coming pop singer. On social media, a lurker is someone who mostly just reads other people’s posts but, for whatever reason, rarely participates. In the recent film Lurker, written and directed by Alex Russell, this idea is combined with that of the fan or follower, someone devoted to or obsessed with a celebrity. The result is a different kind of suspense, exploring the psychology of someone on the margins desperate to stand in the light of someone else’s fame. Matthew Morning is a shy gawky young man working at a…

In Zambia, an extended family’s beloved uncle has died, but one of his nieces holds a secret about him. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Zambian writer and director Rungano Nyoni’s second feature film, is a highly accomplished ensemble drama about family secrets. Secrets don’t just reveal themselves right away, and the film’s style is accordingly a matter of glimpses and intuitions. Shula, a young woman played by Susan Chardy, is driving home from a costume party, still wearing her elaborate disguise, when she finds a dead body in the road. When she gets out of the car to look at…

A Canadian family must cope with the mental illness of the eldest son. When an artist attempts to illuminate painful memories, “less is more” is the general rule—one that is perhaps not followed frequently enough. Canadian director Sophy Romvari, after making award winning short films for ten years, adheres to that rule in her autobiographical first feature Blue Heron. Romvari was the youngest child in a family of four that moved from Hungary to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in 1989. The family in Blue Heron is also of Hungarian origin. Although this element doesn’t seem crucial to the story, she evidently…

Two conspiracy nuts kidnap a woman CEO in the belief that she’s one of a group of extraterrestrials sent to destroy the planet. I missed seeing Bugonia, the latest film from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, when it was playing in theaters. I was a bit wary after being disappointed by his big spectacle Poor Things a few years ago, but I finally caught up recently and was unexpectedly taken with it. Lanthimos’s radical absurdist style caught on in Hollywood, yet he’s remained thoroughly nonconformist, using weird unsettling humor to draw painful conclusions about human nature. Bugonia feels different in a…

Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of recovery from sexual abuse has been dramatized into a startling visionary film by Kristen Stewart. The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s first feature film as a director, is an adaptation of a memoir by the same title from fiction writer, poet, and essayist Lidia Yuknavitch. Yuknavitch grew up in San Francisco and Florida in the 1960s and ‘70s, was encouraged by a supportive school coach to become a competitive swimmer, and got a sports scholarship to a college in Austin, whereupon her addiction to alcohol and other drugs derailed her potential Olympics career. She then careened…

Cambodian director Rithy Panh dramatizes the true story of three journalists who were given permission to interview Pol Pot during the last few months of his murderous regime. At the age of fifteen Rithy Panh managed to escape the Cambodian genocide, but the entire rest of his family—his parents, sisters, and nephews—were murdered. He made his way to Paris, where he got interested in movies, and eventually graduated from film school there. His career as a director has been devoted almost exclusively to examining that terrible period when the Khmer Rouge conducted mass executions of anyone labeled as bourgeois or…

Video artist Joseph Khalil’s first feature length film weaves a multitude of images exploring Black history, society, and culture. The cutting edge Los Angeles-based artist Khalil Joseph is the creator of many video installations in some of the world’s top museums. His short films have brought into focus vibrant dimensions of African American life, history, and culture. You may have seen some of his music videos, most famously the ones for Beyoncé’s 2016 album “Lemonade.” Now in collaboration with a host of Black intellectuals and creatives, he presents his first feature length movie, entitled BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions. “BLKNWS” are…

Stephen Sondheim’s 1981 musical goes backwards in time telling of three friends and their pursuit of fame and fortune on Broadway. I always thought the idea of telling a story in reverse chronological order was a relatively recent one—from Harold Pinter’s play “Betrayal” in 1978, to be exact. But I’ve just discovered that over a century ago, in 1923, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart did it in their play “Merrily We Roll Along.” It starts with the smashing success of a playwright (the main character), and then goes backward in time through each act, showing through this remarkable reversed…

A man searching for his runaway daughter joins a group of misfits on a journey through the desert and mountains of Morocco. When considering the subject of a world in turmoil, and on the brink of disaster, we may want a film to give us temporary escape, or it might try to sublimate our pain and fear in order to invoke transcendence of some kind. But in some rare cases, a filmmaker will choose to face the crisis head on, with results that are always challenging. That’s the method Spanish director Óliver Laxe has chosen for his new film Sirât.…

Carmen Maura plays an 80-year-old woman who has lived her entire life in Tangier, but is threatened with eviction from her flat by her own daughter, who wants to move her to Madrid. We have a way of calling an experience “bittersweet” when it involves both sorrow and joy. Moroccan director Maryam Touzani has fashioned that idea into an explicit narrative method in her latest film Calle Málaga. The title is from a street in Tangier, a Moroccan city right across from Spain near Gibraltar, which has become legendary for its vibrant mixture of cultures. Many Spanish people emigrated there…

A temperamental Mexican chef, one of many immigrants working in a New York restaurant, gets into trouble with his bosses. It’s a pleasure to witness the growth of a film artist in real time, which I’ve been able to do in the case of Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios since watching his first film at a local festival back in 2014. Now with his fourth film, La Cocina, he’s reached a new level. It’s a major work, an impressive and absorbing drama. La Cocina means The Kitchen in English, in this case the underground kitchen of a fictional Times Square New…

Isabelle Huppert plays a French tutor in Korea with an unconventional method, in Hong Sang-soo’s exploration of the odd ways people communicate. I’m fascinated by the films of Korean director Hong Sang-soo. In style, narrative, and intent, they seem unique. He has ideas to convey, but they’re always manifested through the semi-improvisatory dialogue and action of the actors. We see how people navigate their little worlds, and the quirks and subtleties of character they express, yet it all plays out undramatically, as part of the felt texture of everyday life. Isabelle Huppert feels an affinity for Hong’s method. A Traveler’s…

In 1970, a seemingly normal young guy decides to organize a heist of his town’s local art museum. Kelly Reichardt makes movies that focus on the ordinary, telling stories of people navigating their unglamorous day-to-day lives, often as loners or outsiders. That might not sound interesting on the face of it, but it turns out there’s a strange kind of beauty in these lives that usually escape our notice. Sometimes Reichardt has bumped up against genres like the thriller, the period film, or the western, peeking at the reality underneath the form, while casually kicking the genres aside, like so…

The story of an African immigrant in Paris, working under the radar while trying to obtain refugee status. The plight of the migrant, and the refugee, is a central story of our century. Now in a recent film called Souleymane’s Story, we witness three days in the struggle of one young man to win the right to asylum in France, where he wants to live and work. Souleymane, an immigrant from Guinea, played by Abou Sangaré, has an appointment in a couple days to be interviewed by the Office for Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons. He is employed doing…

A film about the leader of The Shakers, an 18th century religious group, uses songs and dancing to portray the fervent spiritual forces at work in the nonconformist Christian movement. We don’t see many film dramas about devoutly religious people—partly, I think, because the main action takes place inside a character, and this is hard to depict on screen. Mona Fastvold faces that challenge head-on in her new film portraying the life of the leading figure in the history of the Shakers: The Testament of Ann Lee. Amanda Seyfried plays the title role of Ann Lee, a young woman in…

A loner who thinks he’s been cheated by a mortgage firm takes the president of the company hostage, in a story based on actual events in 1977. The 1970s have, for quite awhile now, become a common time frame for American period films. That decade saw the youth counterculture emerge into the mainstream in clothing, lingo, long hair, and a tendency towards the weird and marginal, with multiple challenges to the status quo. It’s a fertile setting for satiric commentary on America. Moreover, the ‘70s were a period when filmmaking broke through the old studio taboos, resulting in an amazing…

Jim Jarmusch presents three stories about parents and their grown up children. Jim Jarmusch started out as kind of an eccentric indie filmmaker, but over a career spanning 45 years, he’s become a legendary eccentric indie filmmaker. His latest movie is called Father Mother Sister Brother. It’s an anthology film, three short stories on a similar theme, put together to make one movie. This is a work of a mature artist—it’s about adult children and their parents. It’s composed largely of talking, but most of the humor and significance lie in what is not said. “Father,” the first story, begins…

Chris Dashiell celebrates his favorite films from last year. At the end of a year, film critics start putting out “Top 10” lists or “Top 20,” or whatever. They’re fun to do—going over all the movies you saw in a year and making a list of your favorites is fun. And for people really into films, they’re fun to read as well. But it still gets taken the wrong way, especially since the lists are often framed as “The Best Films of the Year.” Even a very busy movie reviewer can’t see everything, so the claim that a list is…

Jia Jhangke uses footage spanning twenty years to present this portrait of the incredible changes that have taken place in China. Jia Jhangke is, to my mind, the greatest living director in mainland China. His latest work, Caught by the Tides, actually seems to be a completely new kind of creation. We begin in 2001, with candid footage of mostly middle aged women nostalgically sharing and singing traditional songs with each other, including some from Shanxi opera, in a large and plain-looking room. They are former opera singers having a twenty year reunion. The use of songs as a way…

A man seeking refuge in a coastal city of 1977 Brazil doesn’t know that two men have been hired to kill him, in this brilliant portrait of life under dictatorship. The Secret Agent is the name of a new film by Brazilian writer and director Kleber Mendonça Filho. Right from the start with the title, we have ambiguity. It’s not a spy movie—no one is engaged in espionage. Rather, it’s presenting the experience that is prompted by the idea of a secret agent: always be on your guard, danger lurks around the corner, conceal who you are. In historical terms,…

Considered a failure upon its release in 1984, David Lynch’s version of Frank Herbert’s novel already displays the bold absurdism that the director would take further in his later films. I told someone the other day that I had seen all of the films by David Lynch. But later I realized that I’d forgotten Dune, from 1984, the one widely considered a failure. The completist in me decided I had to watch it. I’ve grown to like Lynch’s work, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that I enjoyed Dune as well—but somehow it was. Lynch took his chance to…

Grigoriy Kozintsev’s epic version of Hamlet presents the tragedy through stark visual means. Many Russian artists have loved and celebrated Shakespeare. Grigoriy Kozintsev, one of the great directors of Soviet cinema, was among them. I had seen his King Lear, from 1971, and was impressed. But I recently watched his masterwork from 1964, seven years earlier: Hamlet. This time I’m more than just impressed. I think it’s one of the greatest Shakespeare films. The first thing that struck me about this epic treatment of Hamlet was the castle, a massive, awe-inspiring medieval hulk looming over the story like a dark…

The story of a search for the body of a Vietnamese soldier killed during the war is set against the difficult lives of two young men working in a coal mine. Việt and Nam, the second feature film from Vietnamese director Trương Minh Quý, begins with two young men working in a coal mine. The conditions are wretched, their bodies are black with coal, and—as we soon discover—they love each other. Much of the introductory section patiently lets us get to know these two in the customary darkness of their work environment. On a rare break, we see them eating…

Joachim Trier’s drama about two daughters confronted with the father who abandoned them uses acting as a symbol of the ways adult children navigate their families. The premise of Sentimental Value, the new movie by Norwegian director Joachim Trier, has a classic simplicity, similar to some of Ingmar Bergman’s films about families. Two sisters cope with their difficult father when he returns to the scene after the death of their mother. The challenge of dramatizing such dynamics is to make it fresh, to explore new angles of an age-old situation. Trier, and his regular co-screenwriter Eskil Vogt have done that,…

Jafar Panahi’s film about revenge and responsibility tells of a group of people who think they have found the man who tortured them in prison, but won’t take action until they’re certain about his identity. A film style that is deceptively simple with a profound effect—this is a rare and wonderful thing. Iranian director Jafar Panahi has a style like that, and never more than his recent film, winner of the Golden Palm at Cannes, called It Was Just an Accident. The title is from the opening sequence: a man is driving his wife and young daughter home from an…

A detective investigating a series of murders in rural China is confronted with his own instability. “Self-aware cinema” is a nickname, that I just made up, to describe a kind of film that uses its style, genre, and characters to symbolize meanings that go beyond and even subvert the movie’s linear narrative. Well, that definition proves how hard it is to speak clearly about this kind of film. The idea isn’t new, but now it’s become sharper and more prevalent. An interesting recent example is Only the River Flows, from Chinese director Wei Shujun. The story takes place in a…

This 1947 film about a woman who moves into a house that is haunted by the ghost of a sea captain is a tender understated beauty. Somebody asked me recently if I had a “comfort film.” I’d never heard that phrase before. You might even think I would reject the concept, since my customary angle as a critic is to highlight challenging films that might even cause discomfort sometimes. But movies can play many roles in our lives, and I realized that comfort can be one of them. My answer, the first that came to mind, is The Ghost and…

Guillermo del Toro’s epic reimagining of the Mary Shelley novel is a marvel of Gothic style. It was inevitable that Guillermo del Toro, with his love of fantasy, monsters, and everything Gothic, would create a version of Mary Shelley’s great novel Frankenstein. So of course he has, in a style of giant painterly excess that storms the heights of melodrama. What I’m saying is: it’s a thing of beauty. Del Toro is a director in the mold of classic Hollywood in its epic moods. He loves sets, props, costumes, and the craft of art direction. The film’s look boldly evokes…

The life of a family in the Italian Alps in 1944 is profoundly affected by the presence of a Sicilian deserter. Vermiglio, a new film by Italian director Maura Delpero, takes place in the village of the title, located in the Italian Alps near the Swiss border. The time is the winter of 1944, the last year of the Second World War in Italy. We meet a large family scraping out a living in this harsh environment. The father, played by Tomasso Ragno, is the village schoolteacher, with his own children among the students, offering basic literacy and other primary…

Raoul Peck’s documentary explores the life and thought of George Orwell, and how his political insights are relevant today. Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has been a prominent creator of radical cinema for four decades. Most probably know him best as the director of I Am Not Your Negro, a 2016 documentary using the words of James Baldwin to describe structural racism in the U.S., which got an Oscar nomination. His latest is called Orwell: 2+2=5. It’s about the work of the English novelist, journalist, and social commentator George Orwell, particularly his writings about politics and the threat of totalitarianism expressed…

Terence Davies adapts Edith Wharton’s novel about the price of trying to fit in to wealthy New York society in the early 20th century. The English filmmaker Terence Davies died two years ago at the age of 78. He’s a director I always admired, and an artist that I think has gone underappreciated by general audiences. One of the films I wish more people knew about is his adaptation, from 2000, of Edith Wharton’s great novel The House of Mirth. Rather than using the material as a vehicle for his own concerns, or creating “entertainment” through the distancing effect of…