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

• Year in Film: Three Critics' Top Three

  published December 24, 2009

  Looking back on a decade dominated by the movie franchise — Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars and... More >>

• Year in Film: Three Critics, One List, Ten Best

  published December 24, 2009

  1. The Hurt Locker: The decade's strongest Iraq movie is also the year's finest action flick, not to mention... More >>

• Money Isn't Everything

  published December 17, 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... More >>

• Agnès from O to 80

  published December 17, 2009

  The cinema, social theorist and sometime filmmaker Edgar Morin argued, is the model for our "mental commerce" with the world. Even awake and in... More >>

• Standing O

  published December 10, 2009

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

• Maniac Cop

  published December 10, 2009

  The joke's on someone in Werner Herzog's awkwardly titled Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Possibly Abel Ferrara who,... More >>

• Merry Pranksters

  published December 3, 2009

  The anti-globalist performance guys who call themselves The Yes Men are masters of forging corporate rhetoric and media protocols. The most recent... More >>

• Middle-of-the-Road

  published November 26, 2009

  The Road, Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning, Oprah-endorsed postapocalyptic survivalist prose poem — in which a father and his... More >>

• Got Your Goat

  published November 5, 2009

  Historical cataclysm produces conspiratorial thinking: Germany's loss in World War I, the JFK assassination and 9/11 are all naturally understood... More >>

• Let the Mild Rumpus Start!

  published October 15, 2009

  Directed by Spike Jonze from a 400-word children's picture book first published in 1963, Where the Wild Things Are may be the... More >>

• The Bee's Knees

  published October 8, 2009

  Though no one's idea of an action film, Andrew Bujalski's Beeswax feels less charmingly aimless than its radically slight precursors... More >>

• Tone Poem

  published September 24, 2009

  Set in the bucolic suburbs of early-19th-century London, as fresh and dewy as a newly mowed lawn, Jane Campion's Bright Star... More >>

• Second Life

  published September 24, 2009

  Jia Zhangke is one of the world's preeminent filmmakers, an essentially contemplative director whose considerable talent is further amplified by... More >>

• Quentin's Final Solution!

  published August 20, 2009

  Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment — rich... More >>

• Family Business

  published August 13, 2009

  As Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola's baroque genealogical melodrama, reaches its appropriately hysterical denouement, Vincent Gallo... More >>

• Man to Man

  published July 30, 2009

  Lynn Shelton's Humpday, a sexual sitcom, opens with a pair of breeders in bed. A youngish married couple, Ben (mumblecordeon Mark... More >>

• What It Feels Like for a Girl

  published July 16, 2009

  Any movie featuring children under ten is a movie wherein documentary bids to trump fiction and behavior can eclipse acting. The 1934 New Deal... More >>

• Totally Gay for You

  published July 9, 2009

  "Heterosexuals can't understand camp because everything they do is camp," opined an associate of the old Playhouse of the Ridiculous, a New... More >>

• Enthusiasm, Curbed

  published July 2, 2009

  Character is destiny — at least for Woody Allen's Whatever Works. Allen's exercise in Woody Allen nostalgia opens with a... More >>

• The Man, The Myth

  published May 21, 2009

  Jim Jarmusch's anonymous antihero hitman (French-Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankolé), identified in the credits of The Limits of... More >>

• Dans la famille

  published May 21, 2009

  Throughout his career, festival favorite Olivier Assayas has alternated between meta-pop, sometimes lurid, neo-new wave genre flicks and their... More >>

• Soderbergh's True Character

  published May 21, 2009

  Steven Soderbergh has no particular stylistic signature, and one of the most uneven oeuvres imaginable. But he does have interests. The essence of... More >>

• Rudo y Cursi: Beautiful Losers

  published May 14, 2009

  Not quite The Further Adventures of Cain & Abel, the second coming of Beavis & Butt-Head, King Kong vs. Godzilla Redux or... More >>

• State of Play

  published April 16, 2009

  Kevin Macdonald's Washington thriller is a bellows designed to puff up the most beaten-down reporter's chest. Compressed from the highly regarded... More >>

• RegularFellas In Gomorrah

  published March 12, 2009

  Martin Scorsese may be presenting Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, but this corrosive, slapdash, grimly exciting exposé... More >>