Flicks with The Film Snob
by Chris Dashiell
Flicks with The Film Snob features a weekly film review focused on new independent releases and old classics. Chris Dashiell knows film, and he knows enough to know what’s worth watching and why. Produced in Tucson Arizona at KXCI Community Radio.
Episodes
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The Black Cat
How to explain my affection for the least typical of all Universal horror films, 1934’s The Black Cat, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer? It won’t be easy, because by most conventional measures concerning story, dialogue, or even just plain scariness, The Black Cat would usually be judged absurd, a...
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You Can See Everything
A film ostensibly about the entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, convicted of fraud, satirizes the way documentaries frame stories about controversial people. I’ve always heard that “truth is stranger than fiction,” but these days, we’re having trouble telling them apart. This is cleverly illustrated…
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Drugstore Cowboy
A portrait of addict life from 1989 features Matt Dillon as the leader of a group of junkies stealing prescription opioids from drugstores. 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...
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Cover-Up
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…
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Late Fame
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...
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The Lower Depths
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…
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Train Dreams
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...
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Tony
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...
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Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
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:...
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Now, Voyager
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…
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Our Land
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...
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Rose of Nevada
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...
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Blue Moon
Depicts one night in the life of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, when his partner Richard Rodgers premiers a new hit musical “Oklahoma!” done with a new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein. The Austin, Texas based director Richard Linklater is always trying new things. His latest movie is about the…
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The Manchurian Candidate
A Cold War thriller tells of an assassin hypnotized by the Chinese to kill a presidential candidate. A special brand of American movie emerged during the Cold War that I call the “paranoid thriller.” It started in the ‘50s as Hollywood’s way of exploiting the “Red Scare,” the fear and hatred of...
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The Quiet Ones
A gritty crime film dramatizes a 2008 heist in Copenhagen, the biggest robbery in Danish history. The heist film is now a well-established genre. From the beginning, the stories have involved losers striving to become winners, underworld types who ultimately get tripped up by mistakes and by…
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Sleep / Obsession
Two films employing the horror genre to explore darker truths about relationships between men and women. A recent sort of “new wave” movement in horror films is discarding old ideas that were based only on scaring you. I offer two examples. My first example is called Sleep. It’s the debut feature...
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Kings of the Road
Wim Wenders’ 1976 movie about two guys traveling around West Germany is a portrait of a time still haunted by the dark legacy of the recent Nazi past. Kings of the Road, a film by Wim Wenders from 1976, opens with a startling event. Bruno, a traveling movie projector repairman played by Rüdiger...
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Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
Sepideh Farsi’s intimate documentary shows the friendship she developed with a young Palestinian woman in Gaza during Israel’s invasion. Trying to describe the suffering of civilians in war tends to fall short—because abstractions, statistics, and an overview of generalities, creates distance in...
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Eephus
A rec league baseball game conveys a gently humorous truth about American men trying to hold on to the rituals of their younger days. On a Sunday afternoon in a small New England town, sometime in the 1990s, two amateur baseball teams play one last game on a field that will soon have to make way...
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Labyrinth of Cinema
Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s final film is a metafictional journey through the world of Japanese war movies, and their relationship to the actual horrors of war. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi is famous in the West mainly for his film House, from 1977, which so far I know only by reputation as a wild, playful, and...
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Backrooms
A man discovers a vast network of empty rooms and hallways, in a film about the dangers of the unconscious. I just watched a weird and genuinely creepy film, currently getting a lot of attention, called Backrooms. One of the unusual aspects of this movie is that the plot, such at is, is secondary...
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Lurker
A young photographer insinuates himself into the entourage surrounding an up-and-coming pop singer. On social media, a lurker is someone who mostly just reads other people’s posts but, for whatever reason, rarely participates. In the recent film Lurker, written and directed by Alex Russell, this...
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On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
In Zambia, an extended family’s beloved uncle has died, but one of his nieces holds a secret about him. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Zambian writer and director Rungano Nyoni’s second feature film, is a highly accomplished ensemble drama about family secrets. Secrets don’t just reveal themselves...
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Blue Heron
A Canadian family must cope with the mental illness of the eldest son. When an artist attempts to illuminate painful memories, “less is more” is the general rule—one that is perhaps not followed frequently enough. Canadian director Sophy Romvari, after making award winning short films for ten...
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Bugonia
Two conspiracy nuts kidnap a woman CEO in the belief that she’s one of a group of extraterrestrials sent to destroy the planet. I missed seeing Bugonia, the latest film from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, when it was playing in theaters. I was a bit wary after being disappointed by his big...
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The Chronology of Water
Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of recovery from sexual abuse has been dramatized into a startling visionary film by Kristen Stewart. The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s first feature film as a director, is an adaptation of a memoir by the same title from fiction writer, poet, and essayist Lidia...
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Meeting with Pol Pot
Cambodian director Rithy Panh dramatizes the true story of three journalists who were given permission to interview Pol Pot during the last few months of his murderous regime. At the age of fifteen Rithy Panh managed to escape the Cambodian genocide, but the entire rest of his family—his parents,...
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BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions
Video artist Joseph Khalil’s first feature length film weaves a multitude of images exploring Black history, society, and culture. The cutting edge Los Angeles-based artist Khalil Joseph is the creator of many video installations in some of the world’s top museums. His short films have brought…
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Merrily We Roll Along
Stephen Sondheim’s 1981 musical goes backwards in time telling of three friends and their pursuit of fame and fortune on Broadway. I always thought the idea of telling a story in reverse chronological order was a relatively recent one—from Harold Pinter’s play “Betrayal” in 1978, to be exact. But...
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Sirât
A man searching for his runaway daughter joins a group of misfits on a journey through the desert and mountains of Morocco. When considering the subject of a world in turmoil, and on the brink of disaster, we may want a film to give us temporary escape, or it might try to sublimate our pain and...
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Calle Málaga
Carmen Maura plays an 80-year-old woman who has lived her entire life in Tangier, but is threatened with eviction from her flat by her own daughter, who wants to move her to Madrid. We have a way of calling an experience “bittersweet” when it involves both sorrow and joy. Moroccan director Maryam...
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La Cocina
A temperamental Mexican chef, one of many immigrants working in a New York restaurant, gets into trouble with his bosses. It’s a pleasure to witness the growth of a film artist in real time, which I’ve been able to do in the case of Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios since watching his first…
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A Traveler's Needs
Isabelle Huppert plays a French tutor in Korea with an unconventional method, in Hong Sang-soo’s exploration of the odd ways people communicate. I’m fascinated by the films of Korean director Hong Sang-soo. In style, narrative, and intent, they seem unique. He has ideas to convey, but they’re...
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The Mastermind
In 1970, a seemingly normal young guy decides to organize a heist of his town’s local art museum. Kelly Reichardt makes movies that focus on the ordinary, telling stories of people navigating their unglamorous day-to-day lives, often as loners or outsiders. That might not sound interesting on the...
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Souleymane's Story
The story of an African immigrant in Paris, working under the radar while trying to obtain refugee status. The plight of the migrant, and the refugee, is a central story of our century. Now in a recent film called Souleymane’s Story, we witness three days in the struggle of one young man to win…
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The Testament of Ann Lee
A film about the leader of The Shakers, an 18th century religious group, uses songs and dancing to portray the fervent spiritual forces at work in the nonconformist Christian movement. We don’t see many film dramas about devoutly religious people—partly, I think, because the main action takes…
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Dead Man's Wire
A loner who thinks he’s been cheated by a mortgage firm takes the president of the company hostage, in a story based on actual events in 1977. The 1970s have, for quite awhile now, become a common time frame for American period films. That decade saw the youth counterculture emerge into the...
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Father Mother Sister Brother
Jim Jarmusch presents three stories about parents and their grown up children. Jim Jarmusch started out as kind of an eccentric indie filmmaker, but over a career spanning 45 years, he’s become a legendary eccentric indie filmmaker. His latest movie is called Father Mother Sister Brother. It’s an...
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A Time of Reckoning: the Film Snob's Favorites of 2025
Chris Dashiell celebrates his favorite films from last year. At the end of a year, film critics start putting out “Top 10” lists or “Top 20,” or whatever. They’re fun to do—going over all the movies you saw in a year and making a list of your favorites is fun. And for people really into films,...
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Caught by the Tides
Jia Jhangke uses footage spanning twenty years to present this portrait of the incredible changes that have taken place in China. Jia Jhangke is, to my mind, the greatest living director in mainland China. His latest work, Caught by the Tides, actually seems to be a completely new kind of…
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The Secret Agent
A man seeking refuge in a coastal city of 1977 Brazil doesn’t know that two men have been hired to kill him, in this brilliant portrait of life under dictatorship. The Secret Agent is the name of a new film by Brazilian writer and director Kleber Mendonça Filho. Right from the start with the…
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Dune
Considered a failure upon its release in 1984, David Lynch’s version of Frank Herbert’s novel already displays the bold absurdism that the director would take further in his later films. I told someone the other day that I had seen all of the films by David Lynch. But later I realized that I’d...
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Hamlet
Grigoriy Kozintsev’s epic version of Hamlet presents the tragedy through stark visual means. Many Russian artists have loved and celebrated Shakespeare. Grigoriy Kozintsev, one of the great directors of Soviet cinema, was among them. I had seen his King Lear, from 1971, and was impressed. But I...
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Việt and Nam
The story of a search for the body of a Vietnamese soldier killed during the war is set against the difficult lives of two young men working in a coal mine. Việt and Nam, the second feature film from Vietnamese director Trương Minh Quý, begins with two young men working in a coal mine. The...
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Sentimental Value
Joachim Trier’s drama about two daughters confronted with the father who abandoned them uses acting as a symbol of the ways adult children navigate their families. The premise of Sentimental Value, the new movie by Norwegian director Joachim Trier, has a classic simplicity, similar to some of...
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It Was Just an Accident
Jafar Panahi’s film about revenge and responsibility tells of a group of people who think they have found the man who tortured them in prison, but won’t take action until they’re certain about his identity. A film style that is deceptively simple with a profound effect—this is a rare and…
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Only the River Flows
A detective investigating a series of murders in rural China is confronted with his own instability. “Self-aware cinema” is a nickname, that I just made up, to describe a kind of film that uses its style, genre, and characters to symbolize meanings that go beyond and even subvert the movie’s…
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The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
This 1947 film about a woman who moves into a house that is haunted by the ghost of a sea captain is a tender understated beauty. Somebody asked me recently if I had a “comfort film.” I’d never heard that phrase before. You might even think I would reject the concept, since my customary angle as…
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Frankenstein
Guillermo del Toro’s epic reimagining of the Mary Shelley novel is a marvel of Gothic style. It was inevitable that Guillermo del Toro, with his love of fantasy, monsters, and everything Gothic, would create a version of Mary Shelley’s great novel Frankenstein. So of course he has, in a style of...
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Vermiglio
The life of a family in the Italian Alps in 1944 is profoundly affected by the presence of a Sicilian deserter. Vermiglio, a new film by Italian director Maura Delpero, takes place in the village of the title, located in the Italian Alps near the Swiss border. The time is the winter of 1944, the...
About this show
Flicks with The Film Snob features a weekly film review focused on new independent releases and old classics. Chris Dashiell knows film, and he knows enough to know what’s worth watching and why. Produced in Tucson Arizona at KXCI Community Radio.
Hosted by
Chris Dashiell