Flicks with The Film Snob

Catherine Deneuve plays a famous actress in conflict with her daughter, played by Juliette Binoche, in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first film made outside of Japan.

Over the past 25 years, Japanese filmmaker…

In a Leningrad hospital, two women deal with the aftereffects of their experiences in World War II, in a powerful examination of trauma by a young Russian director.

The trauma that happens to people …

Minari, the latest film from writer-director Lee Isaac Chung, tells the story of an immigrant Korean family’s struggle to make a new life in the United States.

The young father, Jacob, played by Stev…

Alice Rohrwacher’s two-part fable portrays the fragility of goodness in a corrupted world.

We’ve often heard about the problem of evil, framed in the context of theology, philosophy, or in literature…

A Danish action film starts out looking like just another revenge drama, but then pulls the rug out from under the audience in a delightful way.

It’s fairly easy to describe a revenge-themed action …

Time profiles a woman fighting for her husband to get parole, against the background of unequal sentencing of African Americans, while MLK/FBI tells of J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to destroy Dr. Marti…

The moral no-man’s land of modern Romania is depicted in Corneliu Porumboiu’s latest picture as an ironic version of film noir.

Romanian writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu is fascinated by the ways t…

David Fincher’s witty drama about the Hollywood screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz recreates classic Hollywood style while satirizing its illusions.

Mank, the latest film from director David Fincher, cen…

Kirsten Johnson brings us closer to the acceptance of mortality in a mischievous film that uses stunts and special effects to depict various scenarios of her 88-year-old father’s death. Dick Johnson…

A young couple stays at the house of author Shirley Jackson and her husband, getting drawn into their chaotic relationship, in a film that illuminates the mind and creative process of Jackson, a bril…

Charlie Kaufman’s latest mindbender tells the story of a young couple on a voyage, a strange trip into the uncertainty of self and other.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Charlie Kaufman’s fourth fil…

An amazing simulated documentary celebrates the world of neighborhood bars: the situation is invented, but the people are real.

If you’ve ever gone to a neighborhood bar frequently, for a year or mo…

A 1982 documentary presents the myriad ways that the U.S. government deceived and indoctrinated the public about nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

Released at the beginning of the Reagan era, in a…

Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 fable of a medieval knight grappling with questions about God and Death was the film that first brought him international fame.

The Seventh Seal was Swedish director Ingmar Ber…

James Mason plays a wounded Irish gunman in Belfast, pursued by a manhunt, in Carol Reed’s tragic and beautiful film from 1947.

Odd Man Out, a 1947 film by British director Carol Reed, is that rare …

Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film about coming of age in a small north Texas town in the 1950s has endured as an American film classic.

The Last Picture Show, the breakthrough 1971 film by Peter Bogdano…

Robert Altman’s account of a gang of hapless bank robbers during the Depression highlights the difference between romantic illusions and sordid reality.

In Robert Altman’s 1974 film Thieves Like Us, …

Jean-Luc Godard’s misunderstood antiwar film from 1963 exposes the stupidity of war by ridiculing the aesthetics of war movies.

The philosopher Simone Weil once remarked that evil is attractive in li…