Flicks with The Film Snob

Gloria, a new film from Chile, seemed top be such a simple story that I thought “Why should I see this?” until I finally gave in, went to see it, and realized that its simplicity, and the seemingly …

   Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad is no stranger to controversy. His 2008 film Paradise Now presented a sympathetic portrait of suicide bombers. His latest picture is called Omar, and like the…

A little miracle has come out of Georgia, the former Soviet republic. It’s a film called In Bloom, written by Nana Ekvtimishvili, and directed by her and Simon Gross. It tells of two 14-year-old gir…

One of my favorite movies from recent years was A Separation, an Iranian film about the breaking apart of a family that ended up winning the foreign film Oscar, the first picture from that country t…

   The best film of 2013 may have been something I didn’t see, or didn’t even have a chance to see. There’s a wealth of great stuff being made, and a film snob’s duty is to take the time (and the tr…

The difficulty of dealing with aging parents, and all the problems of growing old oneself—these can be painful subjects, and mainstream commercial movies generally don’t want to bring such things up…

   That the great English author Charles Dickens had a mistress during the last dozen years of his life was a well-kept secret only revealed some seventy years after his death. The name of the mistr…

Fruitvale Station is movie that I meant to see when it played in the theaters earlier this year, but ended up not finding the time. Luckily, word of mouth kept it on my radar, so I just saw it on DV…

   Dallas Buyers Club takes us back to the early period of the AIDS epidemic, when ignorance and homophobia stood in the way of progress in fighting the deadly disease. The screenplay, written by Cr…

Whenever we regard a period of history as an age of innocence, it tells more about our wishes in the present than it does about the age in question, which was always much less innocent than we think…

John Sayles holds a unique place in American film. For over three decades, he’s written and directed smart independent films on his own terms, financing his work with occasional forays into Hollywoo…

The best film version of Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations, I think almost everyone would agree, is David Lean’s 1946 film. It conveys the moody, Gothic air of this late work, especially wit…

   Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuaron, steps away from the Star Trek / Star Wars type outer space film we’ve become used to, with their aliens and energy weapons and so forth, and goes back to the …

There have been two films this year featuring a ship being hijacked by Somali pirates. This is, of course, a very topical subject. Although both films are good, it’s interesting how different their …

It’s remarkable, when you think about it, how few serious American film dramas have dealt with the subject of American slavery. Of course we think of Roots, and there are others…but not many. Maybe …

I like directors that can fill a big canvas, make films that you can be immersed in, an experience rather than just an event. Abdellatif Kechiche does that in his new film, and on a subject that is …

   The well-crafted drama Mother of George takes place in one of those small communities from overseas transplanted into urban American society, in this case a vibrant group of Nigerians living in B…

Inequality for All is the title of a documentary by Jacob Kornbluth, which examines the extraordinary disparity in wealth between the richest Americans and the rest of us. The man at the center of t…