Flicks with The Film Snob

A veteran of Soviet cinema presents a powerful drama about an incident in 1962, when factory workers in a Don Region city go on strike, and a true believer in Stalinism must face the consequences of …

Mikio Naruse’s great 1960 film presents a compassionate view of the life of bar hostesses in a disreputable section of Tokyo.

I find it puzzling that Japanese director Mikio Naruse didn’t become more…

The true story of the 2018 effort to rescue thirteen boys trapped in a huge flooded cave in Thailand is more exciting than most fiction.

There are true stories that are so exciting, documentary filmm…

Twenty years after the release of Shunji Iwai’s film about early adolescence, the movie’s insights and prescience about the effects of the internet are still remarkably fresh.

Twenty years ago, in 20…

Thomas Vinterburg’s Oscar-winning comedy tells of four men who decide to use a small amount of alcohol to reinvigorate their jobs and personal lives, with troubling results.

Another Round, the lates…

The traditional way of beekeeping preserved by a Macedonian woman runs up against the modern motive for profit at all costs, in this gorgeous documentary.

It’s difficult for a documentary filmmaker t…

Ken Loach and Paul Laverty present another great film about working class life: a portrait of an English family having to find a way to support themselves and each other in the new “gig” economy.

A m…

The latest film by the darkly absurdist Swedish director Roy Andersson tackles the vexing subject of religion.

Whenever I review a film by Roy Andersson, I feel like I have to prepare my audience aga…

Werner Herzog presents a portrait of his friend, the journalist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin; while Patricio Guzmán examines the mountain range dividing Chile’s coast from its interior, drawing co…

Getting old is the source of fear in a new horror movie by Natalie Erika James, about a woman on the edge of dementia whose daughter and granddaughter visit, trying to help.

Filmmakers are still find…

A dying man experiences the tragic dualism of past and present, in Andrei Tarkovsky’s autobiographical masterpiece The Mirror.

Perhaps the best way to indicate the very unusual nature of The Mirror, …

A film by Channing Godfrey Peoples tells of a single mother (Nicole Beharie) in an African American neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas, who wants her daughter to run in the Miss Juneteenth pageant, an…

In an industrial town in China, the lives of four people (three young, one old) intertwine on a day darkened by hostility, powerlessness, and revenge. The film is An Elephant Sitting Still, by a youn…

In his first western, Tom Hanks plays an itinerant news reader from Texas who tries to transport a young girl who was an Indian captive to her relatives.

The traditional conventions of the western pr…

Transposing Jack London’s autobiographical novel to Italy, Pietro Marcello highlights the conflict of socialist idealism with the individualistic drive that culminates in fascism.

Jack London was a m…

Anthony Hopkins turns in one of his greatest performances in this portrait of a man becoming increasingly lost to dementia.

The Father is a film about an elderly man suffering from dementia. It star…

A man’s last hours are spent being moved from hospital to hospital within the maze of the Romanian health care system, in this devastating portrait of mortality and disregard from 2005.

Throughout it…

Riz Ahmed plays a rock drummer who loses his hearing and must come to terms with being a deaf person, in Darius Marder’s moving drama.

There have been times when I’ve avoided or delayed seeing a film…

The film version of August Wilson’s play about a jazz recording session in 1927 features Viola Davis in the title role, and Chadwick Boseman as the dramatic center, of a story about the corrosive bit…