About Culture Snob

This site is where I write (and sometimes talk) about popular (and not-so-popular) culture, particularly movies, in a way that's meaningful and satisfying to me. If you find it enjoyable or enlightening, all the better. My hope is that what's written here will prompt readers (yes, both of you) to look at the media products they consume — words, images, sounds, and various combinations of those — in new ways.

That's a carefully worded way of saying that I don't consider Culture Snob to be a repository of standard reviews. Yes, many of the entries will look, smell, and taste like reviews, but I hope they offer more than that. Criticism is, before anything else, a personal reaction to a work, and good critical writing will reveal as much about the author as it does about the works discussed. I try to focus on aspects of a work that interest me and haven't been addressed by other writers.

Content in Culture Snob will primarily fall in two categories: movies and music. (Television is grouped with movies, because they're both motion pictures.) There are also occasional forays into books and sports, and everything else gets lumped into miscellany.

Occasionally what I write is pretty good. Feel free to browse what I consider the best of Culture Snob.

We offer feeds to which you can subscribe to stay current on Culture Snob content.

Culture Snob was founded in July 2003 and moved to its present location in February 2004.

I reserve rights to my writing on this site under a license from Creative Commons, an effort to establish legal middle ground between public domain and copyright.

Jeff Ignatius (snob@culturesnob.net)

Latest Twitter Review

  • 2005’s ‘Stay’ is too aggressively off, fostering sensitivity to its head game rather than engagement in the story. Gosling holds it together
    > More Twitter updates

Recent Comments

  • Nathan: I prefer to look at the text rather than what the creator intended, or what the creator intended originally. And regardless of direct references...
  • I just watched “Magnolia” for the first time, and in the daze afterwards I stumbled on this article. I found it very interesting, but after...
  • If anybody is still reading this, there is LITERALLY what to this naive viewer appears to be a smoking gun (as in, a gun with...
  • Thanks, Culture Snob, for this excellent series of Magnolia analysis. Last night I watched it again for the first time in ten years, having seen...
  • Great post. Very relevant five years later - when we went through the financial crisis. Again there was loads of indignation but very little understanding...
    Clifford Jackman
    No School for Scandal

Other Voices

I'm a LAMB

  • bt_assoc_grey.jpg
Close