Flicks with The Film Snob

Frank Capra’s parable about goodness versus the tyranny of profit bombed on its original release, but then gradually gained classic status with later audiences.

Among the handful of older films that …

Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s provocative 1985 novel satirizes the stressful chaos and insanity of American life.

White Noise, the latest film from director Noah Baumbach, is so differ…

A drama of a woman unjustly ostracized reveals deeper meanings, in a breakthrough work of Mexican cinema.

María Candelaria, a 1943 film by Emilio Fernandez, is a prime example from what is considere…

An 11-year-old girl spends vacation with her divorced dad, in a film about memory and love from Scottish director Charlotte Wells.

The painful struggles between parents and children are often a subje…

Howard Hawks’ classic 1946 crime film stars Humphrey Bogart as hard-boiled L.A. detective Philip Marlowe, trying to solve one of the most complicated mysteries ever made.

It’s hard for me to believe …

A homicide detective becomes romantically obsessed with a woman suspected of killing her husband, in this stylish mystery from Park Chan-wook.

The cinematic world is abuzz with praise for the latest …

The endlessly cyclical nature of life is depicted as four different stories in a sleepy Italian village.

Le Quattro Volte, a film from 2010 by Michelangelo Frammertino, is like a vision of an ancien…

Joanna Hogg continues her semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist, a young woman filmmaker in 1980s England exploring grief.

The Souvenir: Part II is the name of the latest film from English di…

A portrait of a creative genius, a conductor and composer played by Cate Blanchett, explores the dark and unacknowledged heartlessness behind the vigor and prestige of a famous artist.

Tár is the na…

Terence Davies dramatizes the remarkable life of the World War One poet Siegfried Sassoon, weaving back and forth in time to show how much he and others like him lost because of war.

For many modern…

A primal conflict between love and revenge is the theme of Mauritz Stiller’s great saga of Sweden from 1919.

The silent era in Europe is still a largely unexplored treasure house of film, and among t…

Inconsolable grief leads to resistance in a film from Lesotho combining mythic and political truth.

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. Like a myth or a folktale, the third feature film of Mos…

A witty English drama from John Schlesinger about an unusual triangle: a man and a woman both in love with the same man.

John Schlesinger was part of an exciting generation of young English director…

The true story of one of the women in Kosovo whose husbands went missing in the war, who decides to step outside the role conservative society expects of her so that she can support herself and her f…

The classic Harlem Renaissance novel by Ella Larsen about the American delusion of race is beautifully adapted by Rebecca Hall.

Passing is a remarkable film about what we used to call the color line…

Javier Bardem shines in this dark satire about a glad-handing business owner threatened with scandal and controversy.

We’ve all seen commercials, and we know how corporations and businesses promote n…

Alfred Hitchcock made this appeal to join the fight against Hitler a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now this film is valued for being one of the best thrillers of its time.

There was a mino…

Claire Denis’ latest film explores one of her important themes: how desire in man-woman relationships is more complicated than we often assume.

French filmmaker Claire Denis, whom I consider one of o…

Satyajit Ray’s debut film, from 1955, tells of a young boy and his family in a rural village in Bengal, and was the first Indian movie to gain worldwide attention.

In the history of Indian film, ther…

A gripping drama based on real events that occurred during the Serbian attack on Bosnia in 1995 brings home to us the nightmare of modern war.

The terror and helplessness of civilians caught in a gen…