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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

00:03:19

The Magnificent Ambersons

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/06/27

Orson Welles’ 1942 film portraying the decline of an aristocratic American family was marred by studio interference, but is still one of the great masterpieces of cinema. The Magnificent Ambersons, the first film Orson Welles made after Citizen Kane, has suffered from its reputation as something of a “lost” film. It is true that RKO cut 44 minutes from the picture, rearranged some scenes, and attached an incongruous ending that was not shot by Welles. And yet, if I could watch

00:03:18

The Red Shoes

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/06/21

Michael Powell’s 1948 drama, about a ballerina torn between love and career, is possibly the most visually beautiful ever made. If one were asked to name great British film directors, I’m sure that Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean would spring to mind immediately, and rightly so. But a third name that also exemplifies the best in British filmmaking, especially in the 1940s and 50s, is Michael Powell. He and the Hungarian-born screenwriter Emeric Pressburger formed a production

00:03:04

The Awful Truth

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/06/15

Hollywood loved making comedies about divorce, and Leo McCarey’s 1937 film, starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, was the best of the bunch. Recently I was asked to put together a list of my all-time favorite films—not a greatest films of all time list, but a list of movies that were special to me personally. In the process of doing this, I found out that a lot of them were comedies. I need laughter to keep going—it’s as simple as that. Anyway, one of my films was The Awful

00:03:32

Point of Order!

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/06/07

Emile de Antonio’s 1964 documentary about the Army-McCarthy hearings of ten years earlier, was one of the first directly political documentaries of any scope in the U.S. The 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings were among the first government hearings to be televised live, providing a spectacle rivaled only by the much later Watergate hearings. Ten years after this, in 1964, the maverick documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio edited the six weeks of kinescopes into an hour and a half

00:03:15

Jean Vigo

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/05/30

French director Jean Vigo, who died when he was only 29, became an inspiration for several generations of innovative filmmakers. Never has a filmmaker been so influential, with such a short career, as the French director Jean Vigo. With only three films to his name, Vigo, who died of tuberculosis in 1934, at the age of 29, became a major influence on young film artists in France and around the world, his themes and style, reflected in the French New Wave of the ‘60s, the

00:03:35

Impromptu

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/05/23

Judy Davis plays the notorious 19th century feminist author George Sand, during a period where she wooed the composer Frederic Chopin, in this sophisticated farce. Once in a while when I see the previews for a film, it gives me the wrong impression, and makes me decide to stay away. This is what happened to me back in 1991 with Impromptu, a film by James Lapine about the notorious and influential French woman novelist George Sand. The previews made it look silly and trivial,

00:02:57

Pépé le Moko

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/05/17

Jean Gabin plays a famous jewel thief hiding in the Casbah, a criminal neighborhood in Algiers, in this popular French film from 1937. For a brief time in the 1930s, there was a movement in French cinema called “poetic realism.” These films combined deeply romantic themes with a kind of melancholy fatalism, and in retrospect they seem to foreshadow the darkness that France would experience in the coming war. One of my favorite among this group is a 1937 film called Pépé le Moko,

00:03:24

Grand Hotel

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/05/08

MGM’s star-studded 1932 film typifies classic Hollywood style. In what we now call the classic era of Hollywood film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) had more stars than any other studio. In 1932, as if to prove that fact, production chief Irving Thalberg put a whole bunch of them in one big movie called Grand Hotel. The result typifies the period of Hollywood glamour, and it ended up winning the Oscar for Best Picture. Grand Hotel was based on a play, and that in turn was based on a

00:03:01

Andrei Rublev

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/05/01

Tarkovsky’s epic film uses the legend of Russia’s great icon painter to explore urgent questions of art, faith, and suffering. On any film buff’s short list of great Russian directors you’re bound to see the name of Andrei Tarkovsky, who directed seven brilliant and challenging films between 1961 and his death in 1986. After startling the world with his searing anti-war drama Ivan’s Childhood, Tarkovsky took six years to fashion his second film, and my personal favorite among

00:02:55

Dodsworth

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/04/24

William Wyler’s 1936 adaptation of a Sinclair Lewis novel deals was unusual for Hollywood: a portrait of a rocky marriage in middle age. Dodsworth, a 1936 film directed by the great Hollywood filmmaker William Wyler, is an adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel of the same name. It’s a cut above the usual drama of the period because it’s so adult. Sidney Howard adapted his own stage version of the book, and it has the solid, intelligent quality of a good play. Sam Dodsworth,

00:03:25

The Conversation

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/04/16

Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid thriller stars Gene Hackman as an obsessive surveillance expert struggling with his conscience. Since 9/11, the invasion of our privacy by the government’s national security apparatus, as well as by corporations, has become so alarming and pervasive that we might well forget this issue has been with us a lot longer than that, at least since the Cold War. In the 1970s, the illegal spying on antiwar groups and other dissidents, along with the

00:02:58

Shoeshine

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/04/09

Vittorio De Sica’s groundbreaking 1946 film about the tribulations of two Italian street kids was one of the founding documents of the film movement known as “neorealism.” In 1946, Italian director Vittorio De Sica made a marvelous film called Shoeshine. It’s about two street urchins in Rome who make their living by shining shoes. Hanging out at the racetrack, they share a dream of owning their own horse to ride, and they scrape their money together to buy a beautiful white

00:03:40

Salvatore Giuliano

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/04/02

Francesco Rosi’s 1962 film uses the life of the titular Mafia bandit as a stepping-off point for an examination of postwar Sicilian history. A man lies dead in a courtyard of a Sicilian town. The police stand around the body, taking notes. The dead man is notorious criminal Salvatore Giuliano. Soon reporters arrive, clamoring for position, shooting photos. The cops struggle to keep them under control. Thus begins the 1962 film Salvatore Giuliano, directed by Francesco Rosi, an

00:04:11

Saint Frances / The Invisible Man

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/03/25

Saint Frances tells of the friendship between an insecure young woman and the 6-year-old for which she is employed as a nanny, while The Invisible Man is a horror film recasting the H.G. Wells concept into a stalker narrative. Saint Frances, the debut feature film by Alex Thompson, written by and starring Kelly O’Sullivan, is not about the famous saint of Assisi. In this case, Frances is a six-year-old girl, and she’s not at all a saint, but does act as a force for good. This

00:03:53

The Docks of New York

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/03/10

Josef von Sternberg’s 1928 silent movie depicting the life of the destitute on the New York waterfront, is one of the great American films. I’m a devotee of silent films, which I love and collect, yet even I have to admit that, in many cases, one must make certain allowances in terms of the styles and conventions of the times in order to enjoy them. But that’s not at all the case for The Docks of New York, from 1928, directed by Josef von Sternberg. This film achieves a mastery

00:04:13

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/03/03

Celine Sciamma’s remarkably intimate, elegant drama about the bonds between women explores the path of women artists, and how love is fostered when women see and acknowledge one another. A woman painter in an age (the 18th century) when such women were rare, is hired to paint a portrait of a countess’s daughter, who is living on a windswept island off the coast of Brittany. This is the premise of a film that seems itself like a painting in motion, Portrait of a Lady on Fire,

00:03:55

Fantastic Fungi

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/02/25

A visually enthralling documentary explores the potential benefits, on a planetary scale, of mushrooms. Mycology has been a relatively neglected subject over the years. It’s the study of mycelium, which is a term for the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of thread-like filaments that bear fruit in the form of mushrooms. A new movie, written by Mark Monroe, and directed by Louie Schwartzberg, both veterans of documentary filmmaking, aims to remedy that neglect. It’s called

00:04:39

Atlantics

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/02/19

Mati Diop’s first feature tells of a young woman in Senegal, grieving the loss of her lover who died at sea trying to migrate for a better life, and then finding herself challenged by what seems to be the presence of spirits. The central dramatic figure of our time is the migrant, whose shifting, uncertain, and perilous fate reflects that of our world. Atlantics, the first feature film by Mati Diop, expands that metaphor to include the grief and injustice experienced by women,

00:04:51

Dark Waters

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/02/12

Todd Haynes’ meticulous reconstruction of the case brought by a corporate lawyer, played by Mark Ruffalo, against the huge chemical company DuPont, is a devastating indictment of the power of big companies to avoid accountability. Dark Waters tells the story of Robert Bilott, a corporate lawyer with a Cincinnati firm that specialized in defending big chemical corporations against lawsuits. In what seemed a most unlikely turn of events, Bilott became a chief attorney in a

00:04:28

Carnival in Flanders

Flicks with The Film Snob ·

2020/02/05

Jacques Feyder’s 1935 comedy, about the women of a Flemish town disarming an occupying Spanish army with wit and charm, embodies the lost ideals of an earlier time. In 1935, Hitler had been in power in Germany for two years. The rest of Europe desperately hoped that the disaster that was the Great War of 1914 to ‘18 would not be repeated. It was too horrible to contemplate, even though German rearmament made the prospect impossible to ignore. It was against this historical

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