Flicks with The Film Snob

In the 1980s, during the cocaine epidemic, there was a treatment center boom and a rapid increase of membership in addiction recovery groups. At the very end of that decade, a rising new talent, Gus Van Sant, made a brilliant film that defied the usual approach to how addicts are portrayed: from 1989, it’s Drug Store Cowboy. Matt Dillon plays Bob Hughes, a drug dealer and junkie in his 20s driving an old Cadillac sedan around the Portland Oregon area robbing drugstores with a small crew, consisting of his wife Dianne, played by Kelly Lynch, his friend Rick (James LeGros) and…

A documentary about the career of journalist Seymour Hersh, who has broken some of the most important political stories in America since the late 1960s. Seymour Hersh, or “Sy” Hersh to his friends, is an investigative journalist active since 1959—starting in local Chicago newspapers, then going to UPI, and finally The New York Times, where he became famous after breaking the story of the My Lai massacre in 1969. He since became a freelancer and frequent contributor to The New Yorker magazine. Hersh took on some of the toughest news items involving U.S. government crimes, and particularly attempts to conceal those…

An older man, who wrote one book of poetry years ago and then stopped writing, is rediscovered by a group of young writers in New York City. Poetry used to be widely read. It was considered important. Now, when most people don’t read it, poets may justifiably feel nostalgic about the days when intellectuals gathered in Greenwich Village coffee houses and wrote poems.  It’s been idealized, and in the new comedy-drama Late Fame, it’s a subject of wistful satire. Willem Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, an older man living in lower Manhattan who has worked at the post office for the past…

Akira Kurosawa adapted the famous play by Maxim Gorky about a group of outcasts typifying social conflict into a film of remarkable power. It had long been a dream of the director Akira Kurosawa to make a film adapting the great Maxim Gorky play “The Lower Depths” about the struggles of a group of destitute people living in a flophouse. It had been done before several times by other directors, but Kurosawa felt a strong connection with Russian literature. He’d already done a version of Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot,” and another of his films was inspired loosely by Tolstoy’s “The Death of…

U.S. early 20th century history is the context of this story of a hard-working logger in the northwest who has high hopes but must endure great loss. Train Dreams is an historical drama taking place in the forests of the northwest United States during the early 20th century. You might think that the story has to do with trains, and a small part of it does, but the title really symbolizes the painful creation of the modern world in America, born from the sweat and toil of poor working people just trying to survive. The film is directed by Clint Bentley…

An arrogant, pretentious 19-year-old takes a job as a cook in a Cape Cod restaurant and is forced to grow up. In the opening scene of Tony, a comedy from Canadian director Matt Johnson, we see the 19-year-old title character, played by Dominic Sessa, applying for a writing fellowship at Vassar College in New York in 1975. Tony projects a persona of brash self-confidence that doesn’t succeed in hiding his foolishness. He describes his proposed novel as a kind of bildungsroman, a word that he mispronounces, which basically means a coming-of-age story. Here we have a nice bit of irony, because…

A rediscovery of the great South African photographer who lived most of his life in exile in the U.S. Haitian director Raoul Peck has long been in the forefront of radical cinema. His recent documentaries include I Am Not Your Negro, the incisive portrait of James Baldwin from 2016, and Orwell: 2+2=5, which I reviewed last year. Right before the Orwell film he directed a portrait of another artist, not as famous as Baldwin, but a significant one: Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. Ernest Cole was a South African photographer who documented life under apartheid in the 1950s and early ’60s.…

A young woman oppressed by her controlling mother discovers her own strength when she is encouraged by a psychiatrist to go out into the world. In 1942, Bette Davis was Warner Brothers’ biggest star. She’d attained this status not through conventional beauty, but through her talent, hard work, and incredible dramatic range. Her filmography up to that time is basically a list of classics. And now at the height of her career, having already won two Best Actress Oscars, and four other nominations, she starred in one of the great romantic films of the era: Now, Voyager. She plays Charlotte Vale,…

A documentary details the murder trial of a landowner accused of killing an indigenous villager in Argentina, illuminating the long history of exploitation of native people in that country. Argentine writer-director Lucrecia Martel has long been exploring her country’s social tensions and contradictions in her dramatic films. Now in her latest film, she’s turned to documentary, in a project it’s taken her almost a decade to complete: Nuestra Tierra, Our Land. Just as in her fictional works, Our Land plunges us into its subject without explanation, and with no narrative voice, letting us figure out what’s going on by ourselves. A…

Two young fishermen take a job on a boat that has returned after disappearing for thirty years, in a film about the tragic paradoxes of time and mortality. In a mosaic of very brief shots—fragments really—we are shown an old stone and concrete quay above the seaside on a rainy day. A stout middle aged man sees a small boat in the dock below. There is no one on it. As he climbs in, there are close-ups of his face, his feet, the mottled surface of the stones, and a curious old name plate that says “Rose of Nevada.” Rose of…