Flicks with The Film Snob

One of the more surprising recent developments in cinema for me has been the rise to fame of a Greek avant-garde filmmaker named Yorgos Lanthimos. His films satirize the darker aspects of human natur…

I’m not a fan of the Oscars, the Golden Globes, or most of the other Hollywood awards, but one thing I know: to win or even just be nominated helps an artist become much more well known. Lily Gladsto…

Thelma, the debut feature from writer and director Josh Margolin, opens with the title character, a 93-year-old woman played by June Squibb, being taught by her grandson how to use email on her compu…

A tale of a tomb robber in Italy depicts the struggle between the quest for riches and the need for love.

In Greek mythology, a chimera was an imaginary monster combining the features of a lion, a go…

A country village in Japan is threatened by a tourism company in this enigmatic film from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.

Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is an artist of the liminal—that place between percept…

A film mixing reality and fantasy expresses the spiritual struggles in modern Russian society.

It’s not often that a movie manages to summarize the spiritual malaise of an entire nation, while using …

A classic film about lovers who are jewel thieves represents the height of style from director Ernst Lubitsch.

A fortunate director can point to one picture in which all the elements came together to…

A birthday party for a dying man is seen through the eyes of his seven-year-old daughter, portraying her gradual recognition of the truth.

Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés has made a major creativ…

Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic about the life of Pu Yi, China’s last emperor, is a biting depiction of the emptiness of power. The Last Emperor, a 1987 film from director Bernardo Bertolucci, who co-wro…

An indigenous Chilean is forced to accompany two white men massacring native people in Tierra del Fuego to make room for business and settlements.

The time is 1901, the place is Chile. A group of peo…

Frank Borzage’s 1927 romance was a major success and reflected a popular sense of spiritual loss still evoked by the First World War.

If you want to experience Hollywood silent melodrama at its most…

An immersive documentary shows the daily events in a series of Paris hospitals, along with incredible footage of microscopic surgeries.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a movie whose hard-to-remember Lat…

A mystery from Argentina becomes a meditation on love, art, and the agency of women.

Trenque Lauquen, a film by Argentine director Laura Citarella, presents a two-part mystery. First, the mystery of …

The two most famous film versions of Victor Hugo’s novel featured Lon Chaney in 1923, and Charles Laughton in 1939.

In 1831, Victor Hugo wrote one of his most popular novels, “Notre-Dame de Paris.” I…

A satire about a Black literary novelist who publishes a trashy book under a pseudonym to mock the way African Americans are depicted, only to see the book become a best seller.

American Fiction is,…

Isabel Wilkerson wrote a book, published in 2020, called “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It argues that the core of social injustice is much deeper than racism: it is caste, defined as the c…

A junior high school in Germany is a microcosm of society in The Teachers’ Lounge, a film directed by İlker Çatak, and written by Çatak and Johannes Duncker.

There have been a series of thefts from t…

Women film directors are becoming increasingly prominent after decades of being effectively shut out of the profession.

For the majority of movie history, the directors have been mostly men. In Holly…

The story of a man repeatedly imprisoned in Germany for being gay, and his odd relationship to a straight drug addict.

You probably know already that LGBT people were among the groups persecuted by N…

A 1999 film dramatized the real life story of a transgender man in a small Nebraska town, and it is still powerful and relevant today.

In 1999, “transgender” wasn’t a well-known term, at least not in…