Flicks with The Film Snob

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 mysterio…

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,…

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…

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 Academ…

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 versat…

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 urgen…

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, …

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 c…

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 rem…

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,…

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, pu…

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. A…

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 …

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 …

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 w…

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 a…

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 t…

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…

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 J…