Email Author J. Hoberman

Awards

• 2010 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published October 13, 2009

  "Let the Mild Rumpus Start!"

• 2010 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published September 29, 2009

  "Robert Frank's Real America"

• 2010 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published February 4, 2009

  "Why Hard Times Won't Mean Good Times"

• 2009 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published June 12, 2008

  "Deep Freeze"

• 2009 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published September 18, 2008

  "What We Learned About the Election in this Summer's Movies"

• 2009 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published January 24, 2008

  "Kill One for the Gipper"

• 2007 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published December 5, 2006

  "Mel Gibson is Responsible for All the Wars in the World"

• 2007 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published May 16, 2006

  "The New Disaster Movie"

• 2007 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published March 14, 2006

  "Anarchy in the UK"

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2009 Stories by J. Hoberman

• Certainty and a Sure Hand Behind The White Ribbon's Unsolved Mystery

  published December 29, 2009

  The White Ribbon is Michael Haneke's first German-language film since the original Funny Games (1997) and, addressing what used... More >>

• The Decade in Film: A Timeline

  published December 22, 2009

  2000 1/10: America's top Internet-service provider announces plans to acquire the world's largest media conglomerate. At... More >>

• 

  COVER STORY

  Film Poll 2009: An Introduction

  published December 22, 2009

  Topping the 10th annual Village Voice Film Critics' Poll, The Hurt... More >>

• J. Hoberman's Favorite Films of 2009

  published December 22, 2009

  The decade closes with a flashback to the medium's once-vaunted universal appeal, although The Hurt Locker's impressive consensus... More >>

• Robert Downey Jr.'s Wry Sherlock Holmes

  published December 22, 2009

  Sherlock Holmes is another critique of filmmaking—if only by example. As over-emphatic as one might expect from the ham-fisted Guy... More >>

• Police, Adjective Mines Gulf between Cop and Human Values

  published December 22, 2009

  Detective stories imply that mysteries can be solved, or at least rationally explained. Even the most debased example is a secular article of... More >>

• Avatar's Sticker Shock (and Awe)

  published December 15, 2009

  The money is on the screen in Avatar, James Cameron's mega-3-D, mondo-CGI, more-than-a-quarter-billion-dollar baby, and, like the Hope... More >>

• Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King and Karl May on DVD

  published December 15, 2009

  What to get the continentally inclined cinephile who has everything? Last year's must-have DVDs were the long-awaited director-authorized... More >>

• Herzog Ups the Wacko in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

  published December 8, 2009

  Elaborating on his new career as the master of the jive-talking, echt-American, extravagantly titled faux–straight-to-DVD policier,... More >>

• With 3-D CGI, Peter Jackson Makes a One-Dimensional Lovely Bones

  published December 8, 2009

  A one-film cabinet of curiosities, The Lovely Bones turns the most successful CGI director of the '00s loose on one of the decade's... More >>

• 'Beyond the Absurd: Ronald Tavel & Andy Warhol' at Anthology

  published December 8, 2009

  It wasn't called the Factory for nothing. Andy Warhol was a master of the aesthetic assembly line—harnessing all manner of talents in his... More >>

• The Weight of Water

  published December 1, 2009

  Dir. Kathryn Bigelow (2002). Kathryn Bigelow's fiercely wrought time-twister is a literary mystery that weaves an ambiguous marital thriller with... More >>

• The Order of the Universe in Film Ist. a Girl & a Gun

  published December 1, 2009

  Film Ist. a Girl & a Gun, a feature-length assemblage by the 57-year-old Austrian architect-filmmaker-musician Gustav Deutsch last seen... More >>

• George Clooney in Up in the Air

  published December 1, 2009

  Up in the Air goes down like a sedative. This is a movie that's easy to like—and to dislike as well. Less adapted from than... More >>

• M. Hulot's Holiday

  published November 24, 2009

  Dir. Jacques Tati (1953). A delight from beginning to end, this was Tati’s first international hit. In some respects the French Jerry Lewis,... More >>

• Persona

  published November 24, 2009

  Dir. Ingmar Bergman (1966) Bergman responded to the innovations of the international avant-garde and the French new wave, dramatizing an... More >>

• Intolerance

  published November 24, 2009

  Dir. D.W. Griffith (1916). This lavish, delirious exercise in parallel action stacks up four lavish narratives and lets... More >>

• Alphaville

  published November 24, 2009

  Dir. Jean-Luc Godard (1965). Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 conceptual masterpiece is a hardboiled, Pop Art, sci-fi gloss on Jean Cocteau’s... More >>

• Sweeney Todd

  published November 24, 2009

  Dir. Tim Burton (2008). Tim Burton’s adaptation of Steven Sondheim's quasi-operatic exercise in Dickensian-Brechtian Grand Guignol is a... More >>

• Richard Linklater's Orson Welles Puts on Quite a Show

  published November 24, 2009

  The most significant American artist before Andy Warhol to take "the media" as his medium, Orson Welles lives on not only in posthumously... More >>

• Viggo Mortensen's The Road Takes Path of Least Resistance

  published November 24, 2009

  The Road, Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize–winning, Oprah-endorsed, post-apocalyptic survivalist prose poem—in which a... More >>

• The Errand Boy

  published November 17, 2009

  Dir. Jerry Lewis (1962). Jerry Lewis wreaks havoc on a movie studio in this under-appreciated classic—wildly self-reflexive but considerably... More >>

• Die Puppe

  published November 17, 2009

  Dir. Ernst Lubitsch (1919). This early Lubitsch comedy is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’s benign twin. A blatantly theatrical artifice,... More >>

• What Time Is It There?

  published November 17, 2009

  Dir. Tsai Ming-liang (2001). The poet laureate of Tapei’s urban anomie integrates Paris into his particular planet—the sense of urban... More >>

• Mars Attacks!

  published November 17, 2009

  Dir. Tim Burton (1996). This may not be the first Hollywood blockbuster based on a bunch of old bubblegum cards, but it’s the boldly... More >>