Flicks with The Film Snob

Youssef Chahine’s groundbreaking 1958 film dealt frankly with sexual issues, which did not please Egyptian audiences at the time, but it is now considered a classic of world cinema.

Egypt has the lar…

Joaquin Phoenix plays a vigilante for hire who has been damaged by his own traumatic experiences, in the fourth feature from Scottish director Lynne Ramsay.

You Were Never Really Here. That’s a stran…

Wes Anderson brings his unique style and sensibility to his second foray into stop-motion animation, a love letter to Japanese film about a city that banishes its dogs to an island wasteland.

I’ve re…

Written and directed by native Australians, a new film provides a glimpse into the painful history of Australia’s brutal treatment of its original native population.

Sweet Country is a tough, complex…

Beautiful and extremely weird, November mixes Estonian folklore with an unflinching depiction of 19th century peasant life, to create a potent brew.

I’d never seen a film from Estonia until recently,…

Armando Iannucci’s dark comedy about the death of the infamous Soviet dictator, and the power struggle in the Kremlin that followed, is a fierce satire of authoritarianism and its consequences.

The …

Steven Soderbergh’s scary little genre piece features Claire Foy as a woman fleeing a stalker who gets tricked into committing herself to a mental hospital.

Whip-smart and scary, yet seemingly off-t…

A daring debut film from Maysaloun Hamoud tells a story of Palestinian women living in Israel and defying conservative norms by choosing to live modern secular lifestyles.

Young Palestinian women liv…

Independent filmmaker Sally Potter offers a wickedly clever variation on the old “dinner party goes bad” genre.

English writer-director Sally Potter is a rare talent, a feminist who is also a first-r…

Coco is a highly enjoyable and creative animated film, a true celebration of family and the bonds of memory that unite us.

Every critic has blind spots. I’m sure I have more than a few. The fact that…

The Wrong Box showcases a kind of inspired silliness exclusive to the British.

There’s a special place in my heart for silly comedies. I realize I don’t review these kinds of movies on the show very …

Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri presents an allegory of the trauma still being suffered in his home country from its 15-year civil war in the 1970s and 80s, as dramatized by a minor spat between two m…

Luca Guadagnino’s lovely film tells of the romance between a 17-year-old boy summering in 1983 Italy with his parents, and a 24-year-old American man staying with the family.

Call Me by Your Name is …

Paul Thomas Anderson’s second collaboration with Daniel Day-Lewis concerns a fictional English fashion designer in the 1950s whose routine isolation is challenged by a young woman he meets by chance.

Steven Spielberg tackles the story of The Washington Post’s decision to print The Pentagon Papers, and the odyssey of courage by its publisher, played by Meryl Streep.

The Post, Steven Spielberg’s la…

A film by Dee Rees bravely explores the plight of two families, white and black, trying to scrape a living from a Mississippi cotton farm and embroiled in the racial violence and oppression endemic t…

The sequel to the 1982 science fiction classic does not come near it in beauty, but the integrity of its vision makes it worth your time.

This last year saw the release of Blade Runner 2049, a sequel…

Gary Oldman turns in a career topping performance as the embattled Prime Minister Winston Churchill, trying to salvage the United Kingdom from defeat by Hitler in the first months of his term.

There …