Flicks with The Film Snob

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 while on a TV an announcer is going through a list of martyrs—men who died in the war—whose bodies were never recovered, then giving a helpline numb...

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...

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...

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 l...

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 expr...

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…

An aging former revolutionary must try to save his daughter from a racist colonel, in a satiric action film about the current American predicament. We’re living in a time when the news is stranger than fiction. What should filmmakers do in such times? Paul Thomas Anderson, one of our best film directors, has chosen to face this moment by combining the action film with satire. The result is his latest movie, One Battle After Another. In a sort of alternate version of recent history, a revolutionary group called “The French 75” breaks into an immigrant detention camp, freeing all the…

Young men compete in a punishing walking race for which there can only be one survivor, in an adaptation of a Stephen King allegory about male-dominated society. Stephen King, America’s most popular fiction writer, is an expert at writing books and stories that get adapted into films, the majority of which are horror. King’s excellence at horror I attribute, at least in part, to his frank recognition of evil as a powerful force in society. Evil in his books is something we participate in, whether we want to or not. The latest King adaptation is called The Long Walk...

Edward Yang’s second feature, about a couple in crisis because of their different responses to changing conditions in Taipei, was a breakthrough for Taiwanese cinema. Taiwanese director Edward Yang showed a willingness to take risks in his short films, and in his first feature, That Day on the Beach, from 1983. Two years later, in 1985, he released Taipei Story, putting all his money into the project. It failed at the box office, while getting some recognition at international film festivals. Despite its less than spectacular showing, it marked the beginning of a new era in Taiwanese film. Up until…

A teacher at a rural middle school in Turkey is unjustly accused of impropriety by a girl student, but this crisis confronts him with his own lack of awareness. Over the past thirty years, Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been gaining stature as one of the world’s best living directors. His style features long takes, wide shots, and minimal camera movement. Lately, though, he’s been making what I would simply call “philosophical” films that examine human nature and culture, moral responsibility, the individual versus the mass, and the doubts and inner struggles that human beings always go through.

A single mother whose kids were taken away tries to win them back, while she considers offering another child on the way for adoption. Earth Mama, from first-time filmmaker Savanah Leaf, tells the story of a young Black pregnant single mother in Oakland named Gia, and played by Tia Nomore. Successfully avoiding tiresome exposition, Leaf introduces us immediately into Gia’s world. First we witness her answering questions at an office in Child Protective Services. Her two children, a boy and a girl, were taken into foster care when the office was alerted to Gia’s drug use. She’s been m...

A drama about the experiences of inmates participating in a theater program at the titular prison, featuring actual veterans of the program. Sing Sing, a film from director Greg Kwedar, is set, as you might expect, in the famous almost 200-year-old New York State prison thirty miles north of the city called Sing Sing, the name being a distorted version of a Native American name for that area. I’ve only been aware of it through old Hollywood prison movies up until now. But this film takes place in the real Sing Sing of today. In a large auditorium in th

The true story of forbidden romance between the heir to the throne and a 17-year-old girl in 19th century Austria was brought to life in this classic film from 1936. Anatole Litvak was a Russian Jewish writer in the avant-garde theater of the early revolutionary period in the Soviet Union, eventually getting involved in the film industry there. He slipped out of the country in 1925, it’s not clear exactly how, and ended up directing films at UFA, the big German studio that was the home of Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau and many others. He made a few films that…

Two recent films explore new styles and meanings in the horror genre. I think it’s significant that in our current historical moment the most prevalent film genre is horror. It might have something to do with the scariest stuff these days not being in movies, but in the news. Well, there are plenty of routine formulaic horror films, but horror is also attracting new artists that have more on their minds than just saying “Boo!” Many horror films employ supernatural elements, like black magic or demonology. Weapons, written and directed by Zach Cregger, is one of those, but never attemp

Agnès Varda’s film essay on gleaning explores the many implications of this ancient practice. Gleaning—gathering food left on the fields after harvest—is an ancient tradition in Europe. In France, as we learn in the great Agnès Varda’s endearingly personal film from 2000, The Gleaners and I, gleaning is protected by law, although the laws vary in different provinces, and with different crops. Varda was intrigued not only with this practice, but with all its echoes and implications—our attitudes and policies towards waste; our ideas about property, labor and sustenance; the dumpster-diving of the homeless in the citie...

A young woman professor is challenged by the memory of a traumatic event. Sorry, Baby is the debut feature from 31-year-old Eva Victor, who is the writer, director, and star of this drama about persevering through traumatic events with honesty and humor. Victor plays Agnes, a newly promoted professor at a New England school who is visited by her best friend and former college roommate Lydie, played by Naomi Ackie. Their affectionate ways with each other, their conversations and jokes, convey a genuine rapport. Then Lydie springs a surprise: she’s going to have a baby. The film is divided in...

A woman dying from cancer asks an old friend to be in the room next door when she takes her own life. The Room Next Door, the latest film from the grand artist of Spanish cinema, Pedro Almodóvar, is based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez that I have not read, but the story couldn’t be more well-suited to his style. Ingrid, a successful novelist, played by Julianne Moore, discovers that Martha, an old friend with whom she’s been out of touch for years, a former war correspondent played by Tilda Swinton, has cancer. When she visits her i...

Charles Laughton’s only film as a director, from 1955, is the dark tale of a criminal (Robert Mitchum) pretending to be a preacher, who marries an unsuspecting woman (Shelley Winters) in order to find money that her deceased husband had hidden, and in the process terrorizes her and her two children. Charles Laughton was a renowned British actor who made it big in Hollywood, but someday wanted to direct a movie. In 1953, Paul Gregory, a producer and long-time friend, sent him a book by a new writer, Davis Grubb, called “The Night of the Hunter.” Laughton was captivated, and…

Documents the German occupation of Amsterdam from 1940 to 1945 by showing us many locations in the city as they appear today, while a narrator tells us what people and events from the Nazi period lived or took place in that location. Try to imagine your country being attacked, conquered, and then occupied by a hostile foreign power. It’s difficult unless you’ve been through it. The most prominent examples occurred during the Second World War, when Nazi Germany conquered most of the European countries, instituting its murderous practices into the fabric of these countries. We have countless testimonies and books.…

Raven Jackson’s debut feature shows the world of rural black Southern life through the eyes of a serious, sensitive girl. A black girl is being taught how to fish by her father. We see a close up of her hands turning the reel. “Not so fast,” he tells her. “Easy.” When she catches a fish she touches its scales with her fingers, feeling its curious texture. We see her face, with intense eyes, serious and still. A younger girl, her sister, is looking on. Eventually the father says “let’s go home,” but the girl pauses to touch the shallow water…

A pub owner in a depressed town in northern England helps welcome Syrian refugees into the community. British director Ken Loach announced his retirement a couple years ago, at the age of 86. Like everything else in his remarkable career, this was a modest and well considered decision. With 26 feature films, plus numerous shorts and TV programs, he’s been an important presence in cinema for 60 years—one of only ten directors to win the Golden Palm at Cannes twice. But because he never stopped making movies about the lives of working class people, their problems and underlying issues; and…

A parody of a host of film genres displays Wes Anderson’s style at its most avant-garde. I’ve talked a lot about Wes Anderson over the years. In fact I’ve reviewed seven of his films on this show. I’m at the point where I want to just assume you know something about his work by now, and that I don’t have to keep describing his style and methods, such as sets that look like marvelous intricate toys, everything in bold colors, block-like patterns, with the camera either facing the actors head on or from the side, precise ge...

A romance of 19th century France, in which a famous chef comes to rely on his female assistant to carry out his culinary ideas. Food films: movies that tell stories about cooking and eating, are a popular genre. When I think of the best ones, Babette’s Feast and Tampopo immediately come to mind. There are others. Now we can add The Taste of Things, from Vietnamese-French director Trần Anh Hùng, to that list. The Taste of Things begins at a French country estate in the late 19th century. Eugénie, an older woman played by Juliette Binoche, is smi...

A bold adaptation of a famous Czech novel about brutal conflict in 13th century Bohemia, and the struggle between power and innocence. Marketa Lazarová, the 1967 film by Czech writer-director František Vláčil, opens on a vast winter scene, wild horses running in the distance. A deep-voiced narrator says we are being told a series of stories that were assembled “almost at random.” We are plunged into a world of ragtag medieval warriors: stealing, fighting, and killing as they roam through a snow-covered landscape. It turns out that when the film says the stories are random and unworthy, it is seeking…

Two young men are bonded as friends in a Florida juvenile detention camp in the Jim Crow South.  When filmmakers turn to historical subjects of oppression and persecution, it can be difficult to communicate the feeling of living through these events. Well, independent director RaMell Ross found a way to do this, in his adaptation of a 2019 Colson Whitehead novel about a Jim Crow era juvenile reformatory in Florida, Nickel Boys. Nickel Boys opens in 1962, with an African American boy in Tallahassee named Elwood Curtis, raised primarily by his loving grandmother Hattie. Elwood is quiet and studious; he…

Gregory Peck plays a general assigned to toughen up an American aircraft bomber group in England during World War II. During World War II, Hollywood made a lot of war films. There were some good ones, and some not so good, but they were all presented in the spirit of patriotism that was a requirement during the fighting, and so almost every one of them could be called a “flag waver.” Nothing wrong with that, except that the reality of war was softened for homefront audiences. On the other hand, in the years right after the war, from the late…

Martin Scorsese’s 2019 documentary covers Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour from 1975, and Simon Weitzman’s recent doc presents the life and career of Tucson native and rock n’ roll tour manager Chris O’Dell. Bob Dylan’s 1975 “Rolling Thunder Revue” was a unique idea for a concert tour. Dylan and his band at the time (which included the violinist Scarlet Rivera) were the headliners. Joan Baez and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott were also on the bill. Allen Ginsberg came along as a spiritual guide, and he recited some of his poetry in the shows. Various other guests hopped on the bus…

Song Without a Name, the feature debut, from 2019, of Peruvian director Melina León, starts in 1988, with newspaper headlines describing Peru’s financial collapse and the catastrophic inflation that followed. This was a time of conflict between the government and a Maoist terror group called The Shining Path.

In a small cabin within a stark mountain vastness, a fire blazing, a group of native people, Quechuans, are praying and singing while a young man, Leo, dons the beautiful costume of a traditional Andean musician. He’s leaving for the town of Iquitos to work a manual labor job w...

In August of 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono performed in a concert at Madison Square Garden. This was a benefit for mentally disabled people, in response to a recent TV program that had exposed neglect and abuse of patients at the Willowbrook hospital in Staten Island. Well, as it turned out, this was the only full-length concert that John Lennon would do in the years after the Beatles disbanded. He showed up as guests in other people’s concerts, or in brief gigs, but this show was headlined by him and Yoko, and included other artists as well, including St...

Lest anyone think that our current government’s practice of pulling people off the street or out of their homes, and taking them to prisons from which they will never return, is a new idea, they should know that dictatorships have been doing this for quite a while. Military governments in 20th century Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, for instance, made this a regular practice, leaving a legacy of mourning and protest by the relatives of the “disappeared.” I’m Still Here, the most recent film from Brazilian director Walter Salles, dramatizes the real-life story of a family who suffered this out...

At the beginning of Close Your Eyes, the recent film by Spanish director Victor Erice, is a beautifully composed and acted opening scene, set at a country home outside of Paris in 1947. It’s a lovely estate called Triste Del Ray, which means “sadness of the king.” In a large ornate living room, a dying man, an old magisterial Jewish Spaniard played by José María Pou, is hiring a middle-aged Spaniard, played by Jose Coronado, to find his lost teenage daughter in Shanghai. The mystery of this daughter and the man hired to find her promises to be an adven...

In 2022 in Iran, a young woman named Mahsa Amini was arrested for wearing her head scarf, or hijab, too loosely for the Islamic State’s laws on women’s dress. Protests erupted when she died mysteriously in custody. We know that the widespread demonstrations rocked the country for a year before being brutally put down by the government, but all information was censored. Mohammad Rasoulof, the dissident writer and director whose previous films provoked furious accusations from the authorities, has responded with a film called The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Iman, played by Missagh Zareh, is a mi...

American director Steven Soderbergh has nothing left to prove. He’s been making good movies for 36 years, many of them profitable, from independent art films to big studio releases. He got an Oscar, and an Emmy, and widespread critical acclaim. He even retired at one point, and then changed his mind. One of his special skills is that he makes really interesting art films, but then to pay for them he’ll do well-made genre pieces like the Ocean’s Eleven trilogy. Black Bag, his latest film, is an example of the latter. It’s a spy movie, a genre he...

Jean-Pierre Melville, a French director who loved America and its cinema so much that he changed his last name to that of the author of “Moby Dick,” wanted to do a light-hearted crime film, and with the help of Auguste Le Breton, a writer specializing in heist movies, made, in 1956, Bob Le Flambeur, which roughly translated means Bob the Gambler. The financial and critical success of this picture established Melville as one of France’s top filmmakers.

Bob Montagné, played by Roger Duchesne, an aging gambler who has previously done time for bank robbery, runs into a streak...

No Other Land, a film about the Palestinian struggle against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, has been met with worldwide critical acclaim, multiple film festival awards, and finally the Academy Award for best documentary feature. And yet no mainstream distributor in the U.S. was willing to take it on, a fact that should sound an alarm about political pressure in the film industry. It’s finally showing in America now because of two small independent media companies that are offering it to art theaters on request.

Basel Adra is a young Palestinian activist from Mass...

The painful struggle of refugees seeking a better life is urgently depicted in Agnieszka Holland’s film about migrants trapped in the thick forest on the border between Poland and Belarus.

The versatile Polish director and screenwriter Agnieszka Holland has been a filmmaker for almost 55 years. She’s continued to be a presence in world cinema, but I admit I didn’t expect her to make her greatest film at the age of 75. I’m talking about her most recent work: Green Border, a terrific drama about the struggle of migrants and refugees to seek a new home in...

Radu Jude’s film about a young rebel in Romania’s gig economy is a provocative satire on the degraded state of modern society.

For the last two decades, whenever we needed films confronting the urgent predicaments of our century—abrasive, fearless, uncompromising films—Romanian cinema has delivered them. It seems perhaps that the chaotic social landscape emerging after the overthrow of a dictator was an artistic breeding ground for fierce honesty and satire. The most recent Romanian director to emerge to some fame is Radu Jude, whose latest film is dark and defiant on a level rarely s...

Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando is the template for this many-layered exploration of nonbinary and transgender experience.

Paul B. Preciado is a Spanish author, philosopher, and transgender man, whose work includes studies of identity, sexuality, and feminism. But when a small French film company suggested he participate in a movie about his own complicated history as a nonbinary and trans person, he decided that it wasn’t enough to tell his story, as interesting as it might be. Something greater was needed, something evoking the variety and difference within trans lives. He thought of his favorite novel, “Orland...

Every year I make a list, like most film critics, of my favorite movies from the previous year. I do mine later than just about everyone, because I want the quality films released at the end of the calendar year to have time to make it to my home city. I also need to add that in this age of streaming, the recent foreign language films I’ve watched don’t always officially fall within that calendar. C’est la vie. The great thing about streaming is that there are so many excellent films to see besides all the medioc...

Many years ago, I sought out The Baker’s Wife, a comedy from 1938 by Marcel Pagnol, because I read that Orson Welles at one time named it his favorite film. I rented a rather worn VHS copy, and I remember enjoying it and being pleasantly surprised that Welles would love a movie so different in temperament from his own work. It was simple, theatrical in structure, no razzmatazz. Well, I’d long forgotten most of what I’d seen. But upon watching it again recently, I realized it’s a remarkably enjoyable film, and much better presented in Criterion’s lovely r...

One summer in the life of a woman in an “alternative” lifestyle, and her relationship with her introverted 11-year-old daughter. The title of renowned playwright Annie Baker’s first film as a director, Janet Planet, comes from the name of an acupuncture office run by Janet (Julianne Nicholson), a 40-something single mother, somewhere in the hippie section of New England. Alternative lifestyle characters are not often the subjects of film, and that’s one of the pleasures of this one. More central is the relationship between Janet and her 11-year-old daughter Lacey (Zoey Ziegler). It is in every way not what we…

The Brutalist is not about brutalist architecture or the school that created it. Yes, the main character is an architect, and his work appears to be in that style, but for Brady Corbet, the director, and his co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold, brutalism is a metaphor for American postwar society.

The architect, László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody, is a Hungarian Jew who survives Buchenwald and goes to the United States to find work, anxious for his wife and niece who are still in some danger in Europe. Brody is the movie’s dominating presence, playing a melan...

A bold documentary, framed against the jazz of 1959-60, tells how the U.S. helped subvert the government of Congo after independence. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a feat of radical mixed media, put together by Belgian director Johan Grimonprez, documenting the world situation in the 1950s Cold War and how it led to the overthrow of the newly formed government of the Congo and the assassination of its leader, Patrice Lumumba.

It’s called a soundtrack because there were Black Americans, jazz artists, that the State Department sponsored as “Jazz Ambassadors” of friendship from the U.S...

A portrait of three women working at a Mumbai hospital pays tribute to all the struggling people in the great city.

In a big city, our stories can seem to disappear into the enormity of urban life. All We Imagine as Light, the award-winning new film by Payal Kapadia, takes place in Mumbai, the seventh most populous city on earth. In voice-over we hear various migrants, in many different Indian languages, describe their experiences and feelings upon coming to live in Mumbai. The overall sense is of disillusionment. People work and struggle and dream, but they miss...

A man is mistaken for a contract killer, and the ensuing disaster is ripe for dark comedy.

Mayhem can be fun. In a movie, I mean, not in real life. There’s a subgenre of crime films in which hapless characters get involved in some kind of crooked business that spins out of control, with multiple unforeseen consequences. These stories can be very funny if done right, and also fascinating, in the sense of “How bad can this get?” the answer of course being very bad. LaRoy, Texas, Shane Atkinson’s first feature as a director, makes somethin...

A meditation on being in the present moment shows a young man on a weekend before going home from Brussels to Romania, poised between past and future.

Here, a film by Bas Devos, sort of crept up on me unawares. The title is spelled H-e-r-e, and right away that’s a bit confusing because there’s a different film with the same name this year starring Tom Hanks. Anyway, I don’t think we’re ever explicitly told where “here” is geographically, in this movie that is called Here. Not much of “who” either. The film opens on a constructio...

Alain Resnais’ 1961 puzzle film explores the elusive nature of memory.

Last Year at Marienbad, the 1961 film by famed French director Alain Resnais, was controversial from the very first moment it was screened. Many intelligent critics either loved it, or hated it. It deliberately defied all the narrative conventions of film that people were used to. And remarkably, this experiment has never been successfully imitated. Fifty years later, the movie remains one of a kind.

Any summary diminishes the startling nature of the film, but I’ll try anyway. The picture opens with the narrator, a youn...

Fritz Lang brought his fatalistic style and themes to America in this 1937 film about a couple (Henry Fonda & Sylvia Sidney) on the run from the law.

German director Fritz Lang was one of the great artists of silent film. Even those who don’t know much about movies before the sound era have probably at least heard about his science fiction epic Metropolis, from 1927. In his time he was more renowned for his innovative crime and espionage films like Dr. Mabuse and Spies. But with the rise of Hitler to power, Lang saw the writing on the wa...

A real case from the 1980s inspires this compelling thriller about a neo-Nazi group in Idaho, and the FBI agents that pursue them.

With crime dramas, we’ve become used to filmmakers pulling out all the stops to make the stories as exciting and violent as possible. But there’s a movie out now, called The Order, directed by Justin Kurzel, that doesn’t try to do that, doesn’t indulge in any nonsense, because it doesn’t need to: the facts of the story, based on actual events, are suspenseful and thrilling enough on their own.

In 1...

Viggo Mortensen upends our expectations of the western genre in this story of a French American pioneer woman (Vicky Krieps) who defies society’s attempts to control her.

Years ago, one of my writing teachers taught me the difference between popular fiction and literary fiction. In popular fiction, we know what to expect, and we get exactly that. The main characters face obstacles, conflict, danger—and they overcome all of it in the end, and achieve their goals, more or less. Bad people are defeated, good are rewarded. It’s popular because that’s what we wish life was...

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, a film by Fred Schepisi from 1978, is set in Australia at the end of the 19th century. It tells of a young native Australian, an aborigine as they were called, named Jimmie Blacksmith, who is chosen specially by a missionary and his wife to be raised and educated, because he is half-white, and thus according to them more likely to benefit from their civilization. Over the years, he does everything he can to please various white bosses with farm work, and at one point even dons a uniform to help round up missing natives...

Jesse Eisenberg has an odd sense of humor. His latest film, his second as writer and director, is called A Real Pain, and the title doubles as serious statement and casual joke. Eisenberg plays a gentle introvert named David Kaplan, living in New York City with his wife and young son. He and his unmarried cousin and childhood friend Benjy Kaplan, played by Kieran Culkin, are going on a trip to Poland. Their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, died recently, and left them money to visit Poland to see the house she grew up in, and learn more about their...

French director Mia Hansen-Løve has become one of my favorite filmmakers. Her stories about “ordinary” life and relationships, and her style, are so relaxed and organic that the world inside her films seems completely natural, without artifice. I say it “seems,” even though of course there is a definite artistic method at work, but one that draws us comfortably into a movie as if it were home. Her latest is one of her best: it’s called One Fine Morning.

Léa Seydoux  plays Sandra, a widowed single mother who works as a translator for events with English...

The Seventh Seal was Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s seventeenth film, made in 1957, and it was the first to propel him to international fame. It’s easy to see why. A film of intense, dreamlike imagery, it surprised audiences with its conviction that religious and philosophical questions can be handled powerfully in a motion picture.

Here’s the story. Surrounded by the ravages of the plague, a medieval knight (played by Max Von Sydow), who has returned home from the Crusades, is confronted by the personification of Death (played by Bengt Ekerot) whom he challenges to a game o...

A film of political intrigue dramatizes the tortuous process by which the cardinals of the Catholic Church choose a new Pope.

Selecting a new Pope seems a ripe subject for drama because of the air of secrecy surrounding it. It’s not that the mechanics of the procedure are secret, but that the conclave of cardinals that vote on the matter is a sequestered event—no press or public allowed, and for good reason. There’ve been a few films dramatizing this over the years, and now there’s a new one called Conclave. Conclave begins with the deat...

A documentary explores the many aspects of women’s health care in a Paris gynecological ward.

The best documentaries go beyond our desire to be entertained by a subject, like the way something unfamiliar can be made to seem fascinating to a casual observer. A deeper dive brings us into closer contact with ourselves, affecting and often changing our perceptions and feelings about our lives. Our Body, a film by French director Claire Simon, is such a film, a remarkable study of women’s relationship to their own bodies, as seen through the many stories of patients and...

A Georgian woman searches for her runaway niece in Istanbul, in this tender love letter to transgender communities in Georgia and Turkey.

Levan Akin is a Swedish director and screenwriter of Georgian ethnic origin. That is, his parents emigrated to Sweden from the Soviet republic of Georgia in the 1960s, before he was born. After doing some television and film set in Sweden, he started to explore his Georgian heritage, regularly visiting the now independent country. He caused controversy there with a drama about gay men called And Then We Danced, which sparked protests when shown in...

This satire on the exaggerated standard of female beauty is a science fiction horror film in which a new kind of drug replaces an aging actress (Demi Moore) with a younger sexier version of herself.

The Hollywood movie spectacle has been focused on fantasy, science fiction, and horror for a while now, with all the excitement and special effects this involves. I confess that I’ve put myself at arm’s length from these genres for the most part. I get tired of all the glitz pretty quickly. Unless it’s that rare film displaying insight into real s...

David Lean’s 1954 version of a play about a familial tyrant features one of Charles Laughton’s best roles.

In 17th century England, a man named Hobson rented out horses to Cambridge students, but to make sure the best horses weren’t overworked, he gave the students a choice: take the horse nearest the stable door, or none at all. Somehow this entered into popular slang so that “Hobson’s choice” meant being given the illusion of a choice when only one thing is actually being offered. In 1915, a playwright, Harold Brighouse, used the expression as the title for a...

A college professor moonlights as an undercover cop posing as a contract killer, in Richard Linklater’s genial spoof.

Austin, Texas native Richard Linklater has managed to achieve remarkable success as a filmmaker while not compromising his independent views and methods. With a Linklater film you usually get a relaxed comic sensibility combined with intelligent witty dialogue. He doesn’t live near Hollywood, and he has resisted the Hollywood blockbuster mentality, displaying instead a modesty that is satisfied with medium budget films that are well-made, funny and insightful. His latest is called Hit Man, which pokes fun at t...

A unique kind of American immigrant, a woman that worked for the U.S. military as a translator in Afghanistan and now lives in exile, is the main character in the latest film from Iranian British director Babak Jalali. The movie is called Fremont.

Fremont, California, is home to more Afghans than any other U.S. city. One of them is Donya, a young woman played by Anaita Wali Zada, living in an apartment there after fleeing her country at war’s end. She commutes daily to nearby San Francisco, where she works in a fortune cookie fa...

The epic story of a Siberian village, from before the Soviet revolution to the 1960s.

I’ve long been interested in Russian film, including films from the Soviet era. But I’ve only recently begun to explore the work of one of the giants of Russian cinema, who is still with us at the age of 87—Andrey Konchalovsky. He started as a screenwriter in the ‘60s, then moved to directing. And he reached the peak of this phase of his career in 1979, with Siberiade, an epic 4-hour achievement released in two parts, originally for Soviet television.

Siberi...

In 1988, a British high school teacher faces the threat of being outed as a lesbian.

When considering the progress of gay rights, it’s important to remember how long LGBT people have had to hide their sexual identities from family, employers, and government in order to avoid discrimination and persecution. The taboos have a persistent and damaging effect on people’s minds, and it would be a mistake to think this is all in the past now, despite the obvious gains that have been made. British writer-director Georgia Oakley doesn’t see pride as a way to avoid...

Two young men on a vacation at the shore are surprised that there is a woman renting one of the rooms at their cottage.

With each new film, Christian Petzold increases his stature as the foremost 21st century German director. His latest is called Afire. It’s a different kind of work for him, in that here Petzold turns a critical eye on the figure of the lonely artist, the kind of person employing the symbolism and emotional dramaturgy that Petzold himself has displayed in some of his previous films.

Two young men: Felix, a ph...

A gang of women steal oil from Brazilian pipelines, refining it into gas to be sold on the black market.

On a firelit night in an unnamed town, we see people taking oil from a tapped pipeline and pouring the stolen oil into containers. A gang of outlaws, primarily women, operate an illegal oil refinery in Brazil, in a favela, a slum near the city of Brasilia. Above the building is a flag that says, “The Oil is Ours.” The film is called Dry Ground Burning, written and directed by Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta, and it ta...

A conflict develops in a West African village between the women devoted to the water goddess Mami Wata, and the men who condemn their practice as mere superstition. Mami Wata, a film by Nigerian writer-director C.J. “Fiery” Obasi, is subtitled “a West African folklore,” and it does explore the tension between ancient myth and the secular realism of the modern world. In the village of Iyi near the Atlantic Ocean, an older woman named Efe acts as intermediary between the people and Mami Wata, a water goddess or spirit. For generations this role has been passed down through the wome...

Edited footage from outtakes of an interview of Thelonious Monk reveal the contrast between the artist and the demands on his personal presentation.

I’ve seen plenty of documentaries about musicians, some very good—usually you get a biography of the subject; interviews with friends, colleagues, and others; and of course performances. But there’s a movie I watched recently called Rewind & Play, featuring the great jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, and it’s unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Monk was a brilliantly innovative composer and performer from the 1930s on, highly regarded by fellow musicians...

A young man plots to become a duke by killing everyone ahead of him in the line of succession, in this delightful comedy that features Alec Guinness in multiple roles.

British film comedy came into its own in the years following the Second World War. Maybe the extremity of that experience caused something to shift. In any case, there was a new spirit of satire in movies, a flippant disregard for the old values of class snobbery and the stiff upper lip. In the late 1940s and continuing into the ‘50s, the Ealing Studios in west London pr...

An ex-con mother raises her son in Harlem after stealing him from a foster home.

A woman is released from Rikers Island prison in New York in 1994 after doing time for a theft charge. Inez, played by Teyana Taylor, is a hair stylist trying to scrape by in Brooklyn. One day she sees a 6-year-old boy and approaches him. He is silent and reserved. It’s her son Terry, who entered a foster home when she went to jail. Inez discovers that he is unhappy in the foster family, and decides to somehow get him out and ha...

A man enjoys a life of solitude and labor cleaning public toilets in Tokyo.

As the film Perfect Days begins, the morning light awakens a man named Hirayama, who sits quietly on his sleeping mat for a while before rolling it up, then brushes his teeth and shaves in his tiny bathroom, finally emerging from his home, smiling as he looks up at the sky. After getting a coffee from a vending machine in the courtyard, he gets into his van, chooses the cassette tapes he will listen to that day, and goes to work, cleaning a...

A drama about the evolution of a motorcycle group in the ’60s, from club to gang.

Jeff Nichols’ films are known for their gritty working class flavor. His latest one, The Bikeriders, is based on a book of the same title by photographer Danny Lyon, about an actual motorcycle club in the Midwest during the 1960s that eventually turned into a gang. Nichols wrote the screenplay, which captures the inchoate speech patterns of these working class tough guys, and the picture has the loose style of ’70s American cinema. For those accustomed to the slick, overpowering modern Hollyw...

One of the more surprising recent developments in cinema for me has been the rise to fame of a Greek avant-garde filmmaker named Yorgos Lanthimos. His films satirize the darker aspects of human nature, usually in forms of ego and control, and they employ bizarre, sometimes alarming narrative devices. The gallows humor and the challenging depictions of sexual behavior, were not a liability in the art film world. But his English language films, that he started making in 2015, have gained him a much wider audience. His last two movies actually won some Oscars. So how did such an uncompromising...

I’m not a fan of the Oscars, the Golden Globes, or most of the other Hollywood awards, but one thing I know: to win or even just be nominated helps an artist become much more well known. Lily Gladstone won a Globe and was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, the first Native American actress to do either. She now stars in a film called Fancy Dance. Erica Tremblay directs, in her feature debut, and co-wrote the picture with Miciana Alise. They’re both native women.

Gladstone plays...

Thelma, the debut feature from writer and director Josh Margolin, opens with the title character, a 93-year-old woman played by June Squibb, being taught by her grandson how to use email on her computer. Her difficulties learning such things as how to scroll down using a mouse, or what to do when an ad pops up, are a familiar source of humor, but instead of a broad farcical approach, it’s funny while seeming natural and wholly plausible. Fred Hechinger projects gentle patience as the grandson, Daniel, and as for Squibb—this is her movie all the way, built arou...

A tale of a tomb robber in Italy depicts the struggle between the quest for riches and the need for love.

In Greek mythology, a chimera was an imaginary monster combining the features of a lion, a goat, and a snake. But later, for some reason, it became a metaphor for foolish or delusional ideas and objectives. La Chimera, the new film by Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, tells of a young man who compulsively pursues the risky and impractical goal of quickly becoming rich through the theft of antiquities, a chimera that keeps slipping through his fingers.<...

A country village in Japan is threatened by a tourism company in this enigmatic film from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.

Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is an artist of the liminal—that place between perception and symbol that we experience as mystery. This makes his films difficult, because he refuses to break things down to an easily understandable linear pattern, preferring to let meanings arise at their own pace, and not by suggestion. This was true of Drive My Car, which won the Foreign Language Oscar a couple years ago. And it’s especially true of his latest movie...

A film mixing reality and fantasy expresses the spiritual struggles in modern Russian society.

It’s not often that a movie manages to summarize the spiritual malaise of an entire nation, while using a kaleidoscopic hallucinatory style with shifting time periods and identities to scale the heights and plumb the depths of the human soul. I use such hyperbolic language because I find it otherwise too difficult to describe the effect of Petrov’s Flu, the extraordinary film by Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov.

We start out on a bus, with a group of sullen passengers, some...

A classic film about lovers who are jewel thieves represents the height of style from director Ernst Lubitsch.

A fortunate director can point to one picture in which all the elements came together to create something close to perfection. In the case of the great Ernst Lubitsch, the man who brought continental sophistication to Hollywood, that movie was Trouble in Paradise, released in 1932. It was Lubtisch’s favorite among his own films, and posterity has been almost unanimous in proclaiming it his best.

Gaston and Lily (played by Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins) are lovers in...

A birthday party for a dying man is seen through the eyes of his seven-year-old daughter, portraying her gradual recognition of the truth.

Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés has made a major creative leap in her second film, Tótem. Her excellent debut, The Chambermaid, was focused on a day in the life of one isolated character, a housekeeping employee at a big hotel. Now, five years later, her sophomore effort is a gorgeous multi-character ensemble piece.

Tótem opens with Sol, a seven-year old girl, in a public restroom with her mother Lucia, who is...

Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic about the life of Pu Yi, China’s last emperor, is a biting depiction of the emptiness of power. The Last Emperor, a 1987 film from director Bernardo Bertolucci, who co-wrote the screenplay with Mark Peploe, tells the life story of Pu Yi, who ascended the throne of China in 1908 at the age of three, and was eventually deposed. It’s told in flashbacks during his detention and “reeducation” at a prison camp in the 1950s.

Here Bertolucci found a chance to express his political ideas, and another outlet for his love of working on an epic...

An indigenous Chilean is forced to accompany two white men massacring native people in Tierra del Fuego to make room for business and settlements.

The time is 1901, the place is Chile. A group of peons are putting up a fence in the middle of a fierce wind. One of the workers falls to the ground, unable to continue because of a bad arm. A man on horseback wearing the red coat of a British soldier comes up the hill. The worker begs for his life, but the British man shoots him dead on the spot. Another worker...

Frank Borzage’s 1927 romance was a major success and reflected a popular sense of spiritual loss still evoked by the First World War.

If you want to experience Hollywood silent melodrama at its most refined, I suggest you watch Seventh Heaven, the 1927 film by Frank Borzage. Borzage was one of the most important directors of that era, making over fifty silent films that are cited by other directors of the day as influences. Tragically, as was too often the case with movies of that time, only a handful of these films survive. After a move to the Fo...

An immersive documentary shows the daily events in a series of Paris hospitals, along with incredible footage of microscopic surgeries.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a movie whose hard-to-remember Latin title seems designed not to attract viewers, is a fascinating documentary by Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel. They got the world’s attention in 2012 with their film Leviathan. Leviathan used innovative techniques, including tiny water-proof cameras and immersive sound design, to show the workings of a commercial fishing vessel in the North Atlantic. In their latest film, they take us inside of a number of hospitals in Pari...

A mystery from Argentina becomes a meditation on love, art, and the agency of women.

Trenque Lauquen, a film by Argentine director Laura Citarella, presents a two-part mystery. First, the mystery of things we investigate to learn more about them. Second, the mystery of things that are beyond what we can fully know.

The story takes place in and around Trenque Lauquen, a small city in central Argentina. Laura, a young botanist played by Laura Paredes, has gone missing, and her boyfriend, a university professor played by Rafael Spregelburd, searches the area trying to find...

The two most famous film versions of Victor Hugo’s novel featured Lon Chaney in 1923, and Charles Laughton in 1939.

In 1831, Victor Hugo wrote one of his most popular novels, “Notre-Dame de Paris.” In English translation it was renamed The Hunchback of Notre Dame, after its main character, a deformed bell ringer at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in 15th-century Paris named Quasimodo. The story tells of a gypsy dancer, Esmerelda, who unfortunately falls under the lustful eye of the cathedral’s archdeacon Claude Frollo. When she rejects his advances, he frames her in a murder, but as she’s ab...

A satire about a Black literary novelist who publishes a trashy book under a pseudonym to mock the way African Americans are depicted, only to see the book become a best seller.

American Fiction is, on the surface, a film satire on how African American stories are marketed by the publishing industry. But more than that, it’s about the representation of race in popular culture, and how Black Americans are forced to deal with such misconceptions in their lives. With such a weighty subject, you might not expect the film to be funny, but it is. It...

Isabel Wilkerson wrote a book, published in 2020, called “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It argues that the core of social injustice is much deeper than racism: it is caste, defined as the creation of “superior” and “inferior” groups, with the former dominating the latter. It’s a complex argument not based on abstract theory, but on research into the historical evidence of caste worldwide. The book has been hailed as a breakthrough in the study of human society, and has inspired much discussion, and some argument.

Among those deeply affected by this work is the film director Ava D...

A junior high school in Germany is a microcosm of society in The Teachers’ Lounge, a film directed by İlker Çatak, and written by Çatak and Johannes Duncker.

There have been a series of thefts from teachers in the school, and administrators don’t have much to go on. When two kids on the student council are questioned, they cast suspicion on a boy of Turkish ethnicity. An administrative teams goes into a classroom, orders all the girls to leave, then has the boys give up their wallets to be searched. The Turkish kid is found to be carr...

Women film directors are becoming increasingly prominent after decades of being effectively shut out of the profession.

For the majority of movie history, the directors have been mostly men. In Hollywood’s silent era, women played key roles as screenwriters and editors, and in some cases, as directors. But after the studio system was developed in the sound era, when big business finally saw that there was a lot of money to be made, men moved in and took over most of the positions, with women being discouraged in society at the time from being in the wo...

The story of a man repeatedly imprisoned in Germany for being gay, and his odd relationship to a straight drug addict.

You probably know already that LGBT people were among the groups persecuted by Nazi Germany. After the war, the concentration camps ended, but sexual relations between men, as detailed in the German Criminal Code Paragraph 175, from 1871, was still a crime. Great Freedom, directed by Sebastian Meise, tells the story of a gay man named Hans, played by Franz Rogowski, who goes in and out of prison, mostly in, for decades, all for the crime of being...

A 1999 film dramatized the real life story of a transgender man in a small Nebraska town, and it is still powerful and relevant today.

In 1999, “transgender” wasn’t a well-known term, at least not in mainstream culture. That was the year a film called Boys Don’t Cry was released, directed by Kimberley Peirce, and written by Peirce and Andy Bienen. It dramatizes the real-life story of Teena Brandon, who changed her name to Brandon Teena and passed for a young man in a small Nebraska town.

The movie is beautifully crafted, with intensely vulnerable acting...

The Film Snob names his favorite films of the past year.

It was a good year for movies, if your viewing is not confined to Hollywood films. Many of the best reflected the unease of our times.

Here is my annual “favorites” list: as I’ve explained before, I do this a couple of months later than most film critics because the quality pictures from late in the previous year take longer to get to my neck of the woods than to LA, New York, or Chicago. I also need to say that some films, especi...

A Parisian woman who has survived a mass shooting feels compelled to remember the traumatic event that she has blocked out.

Revoir Paris is the latest film from French director Alice Winocour. I’ve seen the title translated as Paris Memories, which, for many, might sound like a romance, but it’s far from that. The subject is trauma, or more precisely, the experience of having suffered severe trauma.

Mia, played by Virginie Efira, is a young Parisian who lives with Vincent, a doctor, played by Grégoire Colin. One night, she ducks into a bistr...

The matter-of-fact depiction of the family life of the commandant of Auschwitz conveys our horrifying capacity of living with and condoning the greatest evil.

The Zone of Interest is the name of the latest film by English writer and director Jonathan Glazer. It opens disconcertingly, with strange sounding vocal music against a blank dark gray screen. Then we meet a German-speaking family, parents and five children, in a large new house with servants and a flower garden and a small swimming pool. We soon notice that the father wears the gray uniform of a German officer, and...

In 1877, the owners of a Swiss clock and watch factory constantly time their employees’ performance, while the workers organize one of the first anarchist communes.

Swiss filmmaker Cyril Schäublin has chosen one quiet moment in history to portray the early stages of the struggle between the industrial owner class and its employees, a moment in which the development of a new idea, anarchism, came into its own. The film, based on real events, is called Unrest. Its style combines an overall feeling of order and tranquility with a tense undercurrent of resistance.

In 1877, the Rus...

Two 12-year-olds with crushes on each other are separated when the girl’s family emigrates from South Korea to Canada. 24 years later, the boy, now an adult, travels to America to see her again.

Past Lives is the debut feature from Korean-Canadian playwright Celine Song. In it, she draws on our experiences of career, romance, and the balancing act between a woman’s past in Korea, and present in America. The themes really apply to anyone that has called two different countries home.

The movie begins with two 12-year-olds in South Korea, a girl and a bo...

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 taste of this unique master of cinema.

Marguerite, played by Suzy Delair, an aspiring music hall singer with the stage name of Jenny Lamour, flirts...