Flicks with The Film Snob

Mexican director Arturo Ripstein dramatizes the notorious “Lonelyhearts Killers” case, transposing it to 1940s Mexico, and depicting the matter-of-fact nature of evil.

In Deep Crimson, the 1996 film …

Alf Sjöberg’s 1951 adaptation of the famous Strindberg play illuminates the dark ambiguity of this story of a reckless young woman of the Swedish upper classes and her cat-and-mouse relationship with…

A dark comedy that stretches across the 20th century in Yugoslavia, Underground is a film of excess that laughs derisively at the colossal waste that is war.

Among filmmakers of recent times who have…

Hal Hartley’s 1990 film, with its desperate misfits and downbeat mood, turned the teen comedy genre on its head.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been thirty years since Hal Hartley’s film Trust came o…

A film of psychological tension and bitter humor, Joseph Losey’s The Servant portrays a butler (Dirk Bogarde) gradually turning the tables on his callow young master (James Fox).

American director Jo…

One of Robert Mitchum’s last great roles was playing a down-on-his-luck hoodlum in this gritty 1973 crime film.

There was an all-too brief renaissance in American film in the 1970s, when writers and …

Carole Lombard hires a bum (William Powell) to act as butler for her crazy family, in one of the greatest and zaniest screwball comedies of the classic era.

The screwball comedy was a special kind of…

The story of an affair between a young upper middle class woman (Isabelle Huppert) and a working class ex-convict (Gérard Depardieu) explores the contrast between a detached intellectual approach to …

One of the gems among Alfred Hitchcock’s early British films, Sabotage tells of an enemy agent in 1930s England, and the tragic consequences of his actions for his unsuspecting wife.

One of the rec…

This one-of-a-kind Soviet film portrays the life of an 18th century Armenian poet not through narrative, but through a succession of brilliant symbolic tableaux.

I’ve spoken on this show before about…

The new millennium was launched in Chinese cinema by this 2000 film by Jia Zhangke, in which the story of a group of young musicians reveals the hollowness of the Chinese economic miracle.

Jia Zhangk…

Polish director Andrzej Wajda examines the dashed hopes of postwar Poland in this story of a partisan fighter (Zbigniew Cybulski) caught between the ideals of the Communist movement and its sordid re…

Orson Welles’ 1942 film portraying the decline of an aristocratic American family was marred by studio interference, but is still one of the great masterpieces of cinema.

The Magnificent Ambersons, …

Michael Powell’s 1948 drama, about a ballerina torn between love and career, is possibly the most visually beautiful ever made.

If one were asked to name great British film directors, I’m sure that A…

Hollywood loved making comedies about divorce, and Leo McCarey’s 1937 film, starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, was the best of the bunch.

Recently I was asked to put together a list of my all-time…

Emile de Antonio’s 1964 documentary about the Army-McCarthy hearings of ten years earlier, was one of the first directly political documentaries of any scope in the U.S.

The 1954 Army-McCarthy hearin…

Judy Davis plays the notorious 19th century feminist author George Sand, during a period where she wooed the composer Frederic Chopin, in this sophisticated farce.

Once in a while when I see the pre…

Jean Gabin plays a famous jewel thief hiding in the Casbah, a criminal neighborhood in Algiers, in this popular French film from 1937.

For a brief time in the 1930s, there was a movement in French ci…