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PODCAST

Flicks with The Film Snob

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.

tv & film visual arts

All Episodes

00:03:22

Lingui

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/09/19

A single mother in Chad defies patriarchal authority to help her teenage daughter get an abortion. How far will a mother go to protect her daughter? Lingui, a film by writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, poses this question against a broader canvas of women’s struggles in the African country of Chad. We first meet Amina, a single mother scratching out a living near the outskirts of Chad’s capital city, N’Djamena, as she cuts up steel belted tires, extracts the steel belts and fabric cords, and

00:03:22

Lingui

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/09/18

A single mother in Chad defies patriarchal authority to help her teenage daughter get an abortion. How far will a mother go to protect her daughter? Lingui, a film by writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, poses this question against a broader canvas of women’s struggles in the African country of Chad. We first meet Amina, a single mother scratching out a living near the outskirts of Chad’s capital city, N’Djamena, as she cuts up steel belted tires, extracts the steel belts and

00:03:20

Showing Up

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/09/14

An introverted sculptor (Michelle Williams) has trouble dealing with people while preparing for a show, in Kelly Reichardt's amusing study of the relationship between art and ordinary life. Kelly Reichardt has been making movies for thirty years, and has gained steady critical acclaim. Most of her feature films take place in Oregon and tell stories of rural working people, and those on the margins of society—misfits. She refuses to romanticize people by making their ordinary lives fit into some

00:03:20

Showing Up

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/09/13

An introverted sculptor (Michelle Williams) has trouble dealing with people while preparing for a show, in Kelly Reichardt’s amusing study of the relationship between art and ordinary life. Kelly Reichardt has been making movies for thirty years, and has gained steady critical acclaim. Most of her feature films take place in Oregon and tell stories of rural working people, and those on the margins of society—misfits. She refuses to romanticize people by making their ordinary

00:03:25

Beau Is Afraid

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/09/06

Ari Aster’s disturbing drama about a man (Joaquin Phoenix) who is afraid of everything all the time, bursts through the limits of the horror genre. American director Ari Aster staked out a claim for being an artist of the horror genre in his first two features, Hereditary and Midsommar. With his third, called Beau Is Afraid, he’s pushed himself, and the audience, past the limits of the form. Is it a horror movie? You could call it that, but I would argue that it purposely

00:03:29

Passages

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/08/30

A charismatic but demanding gay man starts an affair with a woman, while trying to hang on to his husband. American director Ira Sachs makes films that explore relationships—of all kinds, although he’s well known as an important figure in gay cinema since the late 1990s. His latest picture is called Passages, and I think it’s his most remarkable yet. The word “passages” is a way to describe the life of relationships, their lows and heights, the often complicated journey of

00:03:25

The Unholy Trinity of Gangster Movies

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/08/24

In 1931 and ’32, the gangster genre broke through in Hollywood with three great films: Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface. The gangster movie has been a durable genre, along with the western, one of the uniquely American film types. There had been such films in the silent era, but the early 1930s was when they suddenly took off. Three Hollywood films in particular, all made within roughly the same year, were the origin points for just about everything that came after,

00:03:36

There Is No Evil

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/08/16

An Iranian film tells four stories courageously exposing the effects of pervasive state violence on ordinary people. There Is No Evil, a film by Iranian writer and director Mohammad Rasoulof, consists of four separate stories, and if you come to the movie cold, it might be difficult to discover a connecting theme between them. In the first story, we watch an ordinary looking middle-aged man drive his car out of a big parking garage, and then go about his day, dropping his

00:03:34

Oppenheimer

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/08/11

Christopher Nolan presents an account of Robert Oppenheimer’s career as the “father of the atomic bomb,” and the controversy surrounding him. J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American physicist who was assigned to be the head of the Manhattan Project, a team of scientists tasked with developing an atomic bomb during World War II. Once American intelligence knew that German scientists were working on creating such a bomb, it was a race against time for the United States to get there

00:03:32

Asteroid City

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/08/06

American director Wes Anderson has crafted a film about the fictional process itself, through an elaborate evocation of 1950s America and its science fiction. Wes Anderson has a consistent style. It’s impossible to mistake it for someone else’s. But that doesn’t mean all his films are the same, or are based on the same idea. And in the case of his latest picture, Asteroid City, I think we’re seeing something conceptually different from anything he’s done before. We begin in

00:02:30

The Nun’s Story

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/07/29

This 1959 film starring Audrey Hepburn is a rare example of Hollywood taking the rigors and struggles of religious faith seriously. Religious stories go wrong in the movies so often, it’s enough to scare a filmmaker off the subject altogether. But one happy exception is The Nun’s Story from 1959, adapted from a best-seller by Kathryn Hulme, and directed by Fred Zinnemann. Audrey Hepburn plays Gabrielle, the daughter of a famous French surgeon, who becomes a nun in the 1930s and

00:03:33

The Cathedral

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/07/25

A portrait of a normal seeming American family, with a subversive style revealing its inherent dysfunction. The Cathedral, the remarkable sophomore feature by Ricky D’Ambrose, is a subtle drama of an average-seeming extended middle class New Jersey family from the 1980s through the early 2000s. The central couple is Richard Damrosch, who owns a printing business, and his beautiful wife Lydia. They get married in the ‘80s, and have a son together, Jesse. We watch certain scenes,

00:02:47

Payday

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/07/19

A hidden gem from 1973 tells of an alcoholic country singer’s much too complicated life. Often in discussions of that brief period in the early 1970s when there was the promise of a new kind of American film, it seems as if the same few famous names and movies come up: The Godfather, Chinatown, Nashville, and so forth. But perhaps more significant is that a film like Payday could be made, a 1973 picture directed by Daryl Duke, remarkably free in tone and sense of character, with

00:03:14

Alcarràs

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/07/14

A family peach farm in Catalonia must face its end, in this gorgeous evocation of people’s bond with the land. Our connection to the land is one of the central facts of human existence. It’s also true that this connection is not felt so widely or strongly as it used to be, with urban environments growing ever more dominate. Now Spanish director Carla Simón presents a film exploring a family’s deep bond to the farm they live on, and the tragedy of gradual separation from the

00:02:34

Life Is Sweet

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/07/11

Mike Leigh’s comedy of lower middle class English characters became a template for much of his later work. Mike Leigh, the British writer and director, came on the scene in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s with a series of films portraying the ups and downs of lower middle class life in England. Perhaps the most representative is one from 1990 entitled Life Is Sweet. In the film we meet a weird family in a London suburb muddling its way through life. Wendy (Alison Steadman) holds

00:03:33

A New Old Play

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/07/05

The fictional account of a Chinese opera troupe covers, in epic and satiric style, the course of Chinese history from the 1920s through the 1970s. A friend once teased me, calling me “the boy who cried masterpiece,” because of my over-fondness for that word. But I’m going to use that word again, having recently watched the latest film from Chinese director Qiu Jiongjiong, called A New Old Play. It’s a stunning 3-hour epic drama, with satirical elements, about a fictional Chinese

00:03:27

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/06/21

A group of young people plan to blow up an oil pipeline in Texas, in this climate activism thriller. How to Blow Up a Pipeline takes its title from a book by Andreas Malme. It’s not really a “how to” book, but argues that climate activists are going to have to do more than just demonstrate. They’re going to have to commit sabotage if they hope to help prevent the worst catastrophes ahead of us. Daniel Goldhaber’s film turns this idea into a thriller about a team of eight people

00:03:40

Howard Hawks

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/06/18

The great director, known for his versatility, was an independent who jumped to whatever studio would hire him at the moment, never with a long-term contract. There’s a story that after a certain American movie critic spent some time in Paris in the late 50s reading and listening to the new breed of French film critics, he sent a letter to a critic in the States asking, “Who the hell is Howard Hawks?” It’s true that the French elevated Hawks, a seasoned Hollywood director, into

00:03:32

Onoda

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/06/07

The true story of a Japanese officer who stayed on a small Pacific island for thirty years, believing that the second World War was still going on. Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese officer stationed on Lubang, a small island in the Philippines, in 1944. In 1974, he was discovered to still be there, having stayed on that island for the past thirty years, continuing to believe that the war was still going on, surviving in the jungle, and obeying his original orders not to give himself

00:03:28

Saint Omer

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2023/05/31

The trial of a Senegalese immigrant to France for killing her own child brings up many issues for a French writer of Senegalese origin. Saint Omer is the first dramatic film by director Alice Diop, famous up until now in France as a director of documentaries. It’s inspired by Diop’s own experience, attending the trial of a woman in a town in northern France accused of killing her 15-month-old daughter. It wasn’t merely this criminal case that impelled Diop to make the film, but

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