x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

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

00:03:16

The Seventh Seal

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2021/03/26

Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 fable of a medieval knight grappling with questions about God and Death was the film that first brought him international fame. The Seventh Seal was Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s seventeenth film, made in 1957, and it was the first to propel him to international fame. It’s easy to see why. A film of intense, dreamlike imagery, it surprised audiences with its conviction that religious and philosophical questions can be handled powerfully in a motion

00:03:01

Odd Man Out

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2021/03/19

James Mason plays a wounded Irish gunman in Belfast, pursued by a manhunt, in Carol Reed’s tragic and beautiful film from 1947. Odd Man Out, a 1947 film by British director Carol Reed, is that rare work of suspense that conveys a tragic vision. I recently had a chance to see it again, and was struck once more by the film’s humanity and how it brings a profoundly spiritual point of view to a political theme. James Mason plays Johnny McQueen, the head of an outlawed Irish militia

00:03:30

The Last Picture Show

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2021/03/09

Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film about coming of age in a small north Texas town in the 1950s has endured as an American film classic. The Last Picture Show, the breakthrough 1971 film by Peter Bogdanovich, takes place in a declining north Texas town in the early 1950s, where a group of teenagers experience loss and self-discovery. Among them is the quiet Sonny, played by Timothy Bottoms, who has an affair with the school coach’s wife (Cloris Leachman), but is attracted (like all

00:03:14

Thieves Like Us

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2021/03/02

Robert Altman’s account of a gang of hapless bank robbers during the Depression highlights the difference between romantic illusions and sordid reality. In Robert Altman’s 1974 film Thieves Like Us, three convicts (played by Keith Carradine, John Schuck and Bert Remson) escape from a Mississippi prison during the Depression and go on a bank-robbing spree. Along the way, the youngest thief (Carradine) falls for a shy, gawky girl (played by Shelley Duvall) that he meets at a gas

00:03:29

Les Carabiniers

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2021/02/23

Jean-Luc Godard’s misunderstood antiwar film from 1963 exposes the stupidity of war by ridiculing the aesthetics of war movies. The philosopher Simone Weil once remarked that evil is attractive in literature, but ugly and stupid in real life. Les Carabiniers, a 1963 film by French director Jean-Luc Godard, succeeds in portraying this truth. It’s an antiwar film that, instead of evoking indignation—a sentiment that creates a kind of safe zone for the audience—relies on absurdist

00:03:04

Billy Liar

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2021/02/16

Tom Courtenay plays a young man who loses himself in grandiose fantasies in order to escape his dull life, in this sharply observant film from 1963. Overshadowed by the French New Wave of the late 50s and early 60s, England had its own cinematic revival during the same period. A group of young directors challenged old assumptions about what a film should be. One marvelous example is the 1963 film Billy Liar, directed by John Schlesinger. Tom Courtenay plays Billy Fisher, a young

00:03:32

L’Argent

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2021/02/09

Robert Bresson’s 1983 film, his last, portrays the inexorable descent into inhumanity that begins with a simple dishonest act. The great French director Robert Bresson directed his last film in 1983. It’s called L’Argent, which translates as “the gold” or “the money.” The story starts with a couple of schoolboys passing off a forged 500-franc note at a photography shop. Later the shop owner recognizes the forgery, but instead of taking the loss, allows the note to stay in the

00:03:18

Casque d’Or

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2021/02/02

The passion and mores of a lost era, turn-of-the-century France, is recreated in Jacques Becker’s great romantic melodrama from 1952. One of the more underappreciated French filmmakers was Jacques Becker, who brought a great deal of style and intelligence to the cinema in the 1940s and 50s. In 1952 he directed what many consider his masterpiece, Casque d’Or, which translates as “Helmet of Gold” but which actually refers to the enticing blonde hair of its main character, a

00:03:31

The Fire Within

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2021/01/26

An alcoholic contemplates suicide in Louis Malle’s devastating 1963 film about the human desire for meaning. Louis Malle was a director of astonishing range. He did so many different kinds of films that critics have tended to underappreciate him, because they can’t put him in a neat little category. My favorite of his films is one of his earliest—the 1963 poetic drama The Fire Within. The story concerns Alain, an alcoholic in his mid-20s played by Maurice Ronet, who has just

00:03:14

Salesman

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2021/01/19

A study of Boston-area Bible salesmen was the breakthrough documentary of the brothers Albert and David Maysles. The Maysles brothers, Albert and David, pioneered what came to be known as “direct cinema”: a form of documentary without narration or interviews, which allowed the subject to develop in unplanned and unexpected ways. Perhaps you’ve seen Gimme Shelter, their account of the Rolling Stones tour that ended in disaster at Altamont, or Grey Gardens, a quirky portrait of

00:03:17

Topsy-Turvy

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2021/01/12

Topsy-Turvy, a British film that came out in 2000, is about Gilbert and Sullivan, and how they came to create their masterpiece, The Mikado. It’s a magnificent work, beautiful in soul and in conception, glowing with love of the theater, and a triumph for the writer and director, Mike Leigh. Now, it’s rare in period pieces that we escape the sense that a romantic haze separates us from the time in question, or even more commonly, that sets and costumes merely provide a quainter

00:03:02

Meet Me in St. Louis

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2021/01/04

Vincente Minnelli’s musical slice of Americana was his first starring his future wife Judy Garland. In addition to being a film snob, it would seem that I’m something of a Scrooge. I don’t really care for Christmas movies, as a general rule. There is the great Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol, which I’ve talked about before. But beyond that, it’s hard for me to think of one to recommend, unless you count Tim Burton’s clever little animated film The Nightmare Before

00:03:21

Little Fugitive

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/12/29

Three New York photographers put together a low-budget movie in 1953, outside the Hollywood system, using the story of a 7-year-old kid at Coney Island to provide a cinematic slice of real New York life, and Little Fugitive ended up being an influential example of independent film. The independent fiction film was indeed a rarity in the heyday of the studio system. In 1953, Hollywood was making widescreen spectaculars. But that same year, a group of New York photographers—Morris

00:03:08

Variety Lights

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/12/27

Fellini’s first film as director, in collaboration with the veteran Alberto Lattuada, was this witty comedy about a small time traveling theater troupe. When we consider the career of Federico Fellini, we immediately think of his most famous and important films, such as La Strada, La Dolce Vita, or 8 ½. And rightly so. But I like to explore a genius’s earlier works to get a fresh idea of the sources of inspiration, and I often discover some gems along the way. In this instance,

00:03:31

Julius Caesar

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/12/20

Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1953 version of Julius Caesar, starring James Mason, John Gielgud, and Marlon Brando, is one of the few Hollywood renderings of Shakespeare that works. Hollywood has had a rather dismal record adapting Shakespeare to the screen, but one of the few happy exceptions to this was Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1953 version of Julius Caesar. For those unfamiliar with the play, it concerns the decision by two noble Romans, Brutus and Cassius, to assassinate Caesar because the

00:03:18

Stray Dog

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/12/15

Toshirô Mifune plays a cop in postwar Tokyo who has suffered the humiliation of having a criminal take his gun from him, in one of Akira Kurosawa’s excellent early films. Before Akira Kurosawa became a world-famous director, there was a period right after World War II when he made his reputation in Japan with a series of inventive, socially conscious films. Among them was a police drama shot in 1949 called Stray Dog. A young cop, played by Toshirô Mifune, has his gun stolen from

00:03:11

The Curse of the Cat People

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/12/08

A lonely little girl is visited by the ghost of her father’s first wife, in a drama about childhood imagination that was marketed as a horror film. The old RKO studio in Hollywood had a knack for slapping silly titles on producer Val Lewton’s sensitive low-budget films. With 1944’s The Curse of the Cat People, the studio attempted to make audiences believe that it was a sequel to Lewton’s hit 1942 horror film Cat People, but there are no curses and no cats, just the return of

00:02:48

Purple Noon

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/12/01

A shocking tale of murder and deceit, based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, was presented in great style in this 1960 film by French director Rene Clément. In French director Rene Clément’s 1960 thriller Purple Noon, Maurice Ronet plays Philippe, a rich playboy who enjoys goofing off in Italy in the company of Tom, played by Alain Delon, a young acquaintance who’s been sent by Philippe’s father to coax him back to their home in the States. Philippe seems to have everything,

00:03:28

Colonel Redl

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/11/23

A real life scandal from the pre-World War I era, involving an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, is brought to life by director Istvan Szabo, and his brilliant star, Klaus Maria Brandauer. Hungarian director Istvan Szabo is most famous for his excellent 1981 film, and surprise international hit, Mephisto, starring Klaus Maria Brandauer, and this is understandable. But I would like to draw your attention to another film by Szabo starring the same actor, and made in 1985. It’s

00:02:47

Don’t Look Now

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/11/15

Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 film explores the extremes that the grieving mind can go to, in a story of a couple (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) struggling to encounter the ghost of their recently deceased young daughter while staying in Venice. I’m not that big on the horror genre, outside of the old classics like Frankenstein, but there is one very unusual film I would like to recommend for a stormy night: Don’t Look Now, made in 1973 by British director Nicolas Roeg. It’s not

657 results

Similar Podcasts

BEHIND THE VELVET ROPE

David Yontef

Nerd Culture • A Gamekings Podcast

Blammo Media

UPodcast

UPodcast

The Writers Hangout

Sandy Adomaitis

The Sarah Fraser Show

Sarah Fraser