Shopping cart (0 items) |
RSS

J. Hoberman

J. Hoberman’s books include Film After Film (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?) and An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War.

  • New York in Slow Motion

    April 24, 2013

    James Nares’s Street, an engrossing and celebratory hour-long video projection of life in New York City, captures those intensified moments of metropolitan existence that, save in the midst of catastrophe, we usually take for granted.

  • 'Girls' Gone Wild

    March 29, 2013

    Filmmaker Harmony Korine has enjoyed a healthy career as a provocateur and Spring Breakers, however extravagantly prurient, marks his entry into middle-age; it feels mature.

  • Tolkien vs. Technology

    December 19, 2012

    There is a good deal to be said about Peter Jackson’s long-awaited and exceedingly long adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, most of it bad.

  • Trick or Truth?

    October 20, 2012

    “Every photograph is a fake from start to finish,” the photographer Edward Steichen asserted in the first issue of Camera Work in 1903. In what amounts to a backhanded defense of photography as art, Steichen explained that “a purely impersonal, unmanipulated photograph” was “practically impossible.” “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” an exhibition now up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (later traveling to the National Gallery and Houston’s Museum of Fine Art), makes a vigorous case for understanding the medium as Steichen did.

  • Trapped in the Total Cinema

    September 26, 2012

    Can we speak of a twenty-first-century cinema? And if so, on what basis? In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the French film critic André Bazin characterized cinema as an idealistic phenomenon and cinema-making as an intrinsically irrational enterprise. “There was not a single inventor who did not try to combine sound and relief with animation of the image,” Bazin maintained in “The Myth of Total Cinema.”

  • Obama's Evil Twin

    September 5, 2012

    Surpassed only by The Expendables 2, with Sylvester Stallone, the Dinesh D’Souza political documentary 2016: Obama’s America was the second-highest grossing movie in America the week that it opened—timed to coincide with the Republican National Convention—and is now among the top ten highest earning documentaries in history. Like the RNC, 2016 is designed to show the president as a false prophet and a failed leader; unlike the RNC, the D’Souza film is less interested in the nature of Obama’s politics than in the enigma of his personality. With the Democrats gathering in Charlotte to recapture the Obama story, I sought out 2016 at the Regal Union Square in Manhattan to learn more.

  • The Lost Futures of Chris Marker

    August 23, 2012

    At once unsentimentally au courant and fixated on that past, Chris Marker was the Janus of world cinema. His unclassifiable documentaries treat memory as the stuff of science fiction, a notion he shared with his early associate Alain Resnais. Hardly a Luddite, Marker thrived on technological paradox. A half-hour succession of still images evoking motion pictures as time travel, La Jetée, his most generally known work, could have been made for Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century zoopraxiscope.

  • When Westerns Were Un-American

    June 1, 2012

    With the escalation of the Vietnam War, every Marxist intellectual, it seemed, wanted to write a Western. The most notable was Franco Solinas (1927–1982), a teenaged partisan and longtime member of the Italian Communist Party, journalist for the Communist newspaper L’Unità, and author. Solinas worked on four Spaghetti Westerns—all included in a three-week-long series at New York’s Film Forum that begins June 1—contributing to this wildly commercial and equally disreputable mode as decisively as director Sergio Leone or composer Ennio Morricone.

  • Talking Smack About Junk: Shirley Clarke's 'The Connection'

    May 5, 2012

    Re-released in a lovingly restored print on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, Shirley Clarke’s debut film The Connection is an excavated relic of an earlier New York.

  • The Inner Light of Terence Davies

    March 23, 2012

    A nation must have its culture heroes, and current wisdom among Anglo-American movie critics and programmers has advanced Terence Davies to the position of Britain’s greatest living filmmaker. Beginning this week, viewers in New York will have an unusual chance to assess his work afresh, with the US release of The Deep Blue Sea, his new version of the 1952 Terence Rattigan adultery drama of the same name, coinciding with a retrospective of his work at BAM and a revival of The Long Day Closes at Film Forum.

  • A New Obama Cinema?

    February 11, 2012

    A lone lean figure strides purposefully through a dark tunnel, maybe a highway underpass. There’s no fear. A familiar husky voice whispers that “it’s half time—both teams are in their locker rooms, discussing what they can do to win this game in the second half.” One needn’t be a genius like Karl Rove to catch the drift of the two-minute Clint Eastwood-narrated Chrysler spot shown mid-Super Bowl last Sunday and everywhere else ever since. But get it Rove did.

  • Tyrant with a Movie Camera

    June 29, 2010

    Culled from a thousand hours of archival footage and four years in the making, this unconventional documentary assembled by the émigré Romanian film-essayist Andrei Ujică is a three-hour immersion in a totalitarian leader’s official reality.

  • 'Before Midnight'

    Ongoing

    Richard Linklater turns his Before Sunrise and Before Sunset into a trilogy, and the actors deepen their remarkable rapport.

  • 'Leviathan'

    Ongoing

    This documentary made aboard a commercial fishing boat out of New Bedford abstracts the harvesting and processing of seafood into a vision of terrible beauty.

  • Ken Jacobs at Anthology

    May 24, 2013 – May 26, 2013

    The dean of avant-garde film artists is being recognized by two New York institutions, The Museum of Modern Art and Anthology Film Archives. The Anthology program (titled “Insistent Clamor Forever”) offers an idiosyncratic career retrospective.

  • Revelations of a Fallen World: The Cinema of Arturo Ripstein

    May 10, 2013 – May 24, 2013

    Heir to Luis Buñuel, and godfather of the Mexico’s new cinema, Ripstein has over the past four decades developed a distinctive hallucinatory, darkly comic cantina naturalism.

  • 'Something in the Air'

    Ongoing

    Olivier Assayas follows up on his epic Carlos with another period piece, this one evoking the student milieu of the early Seventies

  • The Weimar Touch

    April 3, 2013 – May 6, 2013

    Among other things, the Nazi seizure of power served to send what was then Europe’s leading film industry into exile.

  • Ken Jacobs at MoMA

    May 2, 2013 – May 5, 2013

    The dean of avant-garde film artists is being recognized by two New York institutions, The Museum of Modern Art and Anthology Film Archives. The MoMA show features new 3D works, a selection of early films, and a few of his favorite movies.

  • 'Flaming Creatures' at 50

    April 29, 2013, 7:30 pm

    The most influential and incendiary avant-garde film ever made in America, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures had its first public screening a half-century ago in New York. Anthology is marking the occasion by recreating the original bill.

  • 'Dead Man'

    April 24, 2013 – April 25, 2013

    A western set in the 1870s and filled with creepy period details, Jim Jarmusch’s most uncompromising feature is generally regarded as his masterpiece.

  • 'Room 237'

    Ongoing

    Thanks to DVD and the internet, The Shining has become the subject of elaborate exegeses which are themselves the subject of Rodney Ascher’s documentary feature.

  • Werner Schroeter: Magnificent Obsessions

    January 19, 2013 – April 7, 2013

    Schroeter's most visionary movies—the willfully crude, aggressively campy low-budget opera-travesties he made in the late 1960s and early 1970s—were a significant influence on both Fassbinder and Syberberg.

  • 'The Rose King'

    April 6, 2013, 8:20 pm

    A brilliant assemblage of gothic rot and Catholic kitsch that Werner Schroeter made in 1984 with his longtime superstar Magdalena Montezuma, then dying of cancer.

  • 'No'

    Ongoing

    Chilean director Pablo Larrain caps a trilogy of movies concerning the Pinochet dictatorship—it’s a parable with an edge.

  • 'Holy Motors,' introduced by Leos Carax

    February 23, 2013, 7 pm

    To judge from its critical reception, the first Carax feature in a dozen years is everything that admirers of this raging visionary could wish for. He’ll be on hand to explicate, or not.

  • 'Call Girl'

    February 20, 2013 – February 21, 2013

    Having its US premiere courtesy of Film Comment magazine, Mikael Marcimain’s leisurely political thriller is based on the scandal known in Sweden as Bordellhärvan that nearly brought down the socialist government in the 1970s.

  • A Close-Up of Abbas Kiarostami

    February 8, 2013 – February 17, 2013

    A comprehensive, but not complete, selection of Kiarostami’s narratives, movies for children, documentaries, and digital experiments.

  • 'Modern Romance' & 'We Won't Grow Old Together'

    February 14, 2013 – February 17, 2013

    Calling this show the “Valentine’s Day Massacre,” Anthology’s gutsy programmers have double-billed the two great anti-romances of the 1970s.

  • Art Theater Guild and Japanese Underground Cinema, 1960-1986

    December 6, 2012 – February 10, 2013

    Every year or so there’s a retrospective so comprehensive and rich with little-seen work as to jeopardize one’s day job.

  • 'Zero Dark Thirty'

    Ongoing

    Kathryn Bigelow, whose last film, The Hurt Locker, was the best Hollywood action flick of the twenty-first century, uses the killing of Osama Bin Laden as the basis for an epic procedural.

  • New Yawk New Wave

    January 11, 2013 – January 31, 2013

    New York supported a scrappy, streetwise off-Hollywood well before the coinage “American independent.” “New Yawk New Wave” surveys the movement from Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss through Scorsese’s Mean Streets.

  • 'The Tarnished Angels'

    January 23, 2013 – January 25, 2013, 1:30 pm

    The closest that cultivated emigré Douglas Sirk would come to making a European art film in Hollywood was a svelte adaptation of William Faulkner’s Pylon.

  • First Look 2013

    January 4, 2013 – January 13, 2013

    The second edition of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” opens with the local premiere of Bressonian brutalist Bruno Dumont’s Outside Satan.

  • Barbara Rubin and 'Christmas on Earth'

    January 9, 2013, 7:30 pm

    Barbara Rubin’s 1963 *Christmas on Earth*, made when she was eighteen, is an ethereal tangle of guys posing like Greek statues, girls painted like archaic fertility goddesses, and fingers probing orifices in bleached black and white.

  • 'Tabu'

    December 26, 2012 – January 8, 2013

    This purposefully anachronistic third feature by Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes is so rich with narrative fillips and filled with cinephilic pleasures it could restore your faith in the medium.

  • Ben Gazzara Retrospective

    December 13, 2012 – December 23, 2012

    A varied selection from the rich screen career of Ben Gazzara, who died earlier this year.

  • 'Lincoln'

    Ongoing

    High-minded yet somber, the much awaited Steven Spielberg-Tony Kushner adaptation promises to be the Popular Front sensation of 2012

  • 'Ornette: Made in America'

    December 7, 2012 – December 13, 2012

    A portrait of “free jazz” genius Ornette Coleman, Shirley Clarke’s last and least-known feature is the movie she was born to make.

  • The Rolling Stones: 50 Years on Film

    November 15, 2012 – December 2, 2012

    There’s more depth than might appear in this ferociously crowd-pleasing retrospective.

  • When Horror Came to Shochiku

    November 20, 2012

    Criterion’s bargain-price cult line Eclipse Series is releasing a box of four obscure examples of low-budget, late Sixties horror sci-fi produced at Japan’s most exalted movie studio.

  • 'We Won't Grow Old Together'

    November 15, 2012 – November 17, 2012

    The ultimate bad break-up movie.

  • 'L'eclisse'

    November 9, 2012 – November 11, 2012, 7:30 pm – 6:30 pm

    Less monumental in its purity and more subtle in its radicalism than L’avventura, Antonioni’s 1962 masterpiece showcases Monica Vitti as his moodiest, most evasive heroine.

  • 'Holy Motors'

    October 17, 2012 – October 30, 2012

    Leos Carax’s first movie in thirteen years is another singular, impressively crazy piece of work.

  • 'Wuthering Heights'

    Ongoing

    Andrea Arnold’s boldly miserablist, verité-style adaptation evokes the violence of Emily Brontë’s imagination.

  • 'The Dumb Girl of Portici'

    October 13, 2012 – October 21, 2012

    Dance legend Anna Pavlova made her only movie appearance in this elaborate, silent adaption of Daniel Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici.

  • 'The Red Detachment of Women'

    October 19, 2012, 7:30 pm

    A movie that’s simultaneously infectious, chilling, and camp.

  • The New York Film Festival

    September 28, 2012 – October 14, 2012

    New York’s festival of festivals gives local premieres to the most feted movies last May at Cannes (Michael Haneke’s *Amour*, Leos Carax’s *Holy Motors*, Abbas Kiarostami’s *Like Someone in Love*, Christian Mungiu’s *Beyond the Hills*) along with som

  • 'The Ancient Law'

    October 10, 2012, 7 pm

    It’s The Jazz Singer’s Austrian counterpart, albeit silent and here accompanied by multimedia artist Thomas Köner performing live.

  • 'The Master'

    Ongoing

    Paul Thomas Andersen’s muscular account of an American cult leader and his disciple is likely the best and certainly the most ambitious movie that Hollywood will give us this year

  • Andrew Sarris Memorial Screening

    September 19, 2012, 7 pm

    The Museum of Modern Art plays tribute to the highly influential film critic who died last spring with his 1964 Warhol screen test and a screening of Max Ophul’s 1948 *Letter from an Unknown Woman*.

  • 'Cosmopolis'

    Ongoing

    Having failed to set La Croisette aflame last May at Cannes, Cronenberg’s utterly faithful and superbly alienated adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel opens wide.

  • Capturing the Marvelous: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema

    September 7, 2012 – September 12, 2012

    The strong strain of folk surrealism that Alexander Dovzhenko introduced to Ukrainian cinema is sampled and celebrated with two of his silent classics, as well as Sergei Parajanov's robust, near delirious *Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors* and others.

  • 'La Région central'

    September 9, 2012, 3 pm

    Chantal Akerman introduces a rare screening of Michael Snow’s choreographed landscape epic *La Région central* (1971).

  • 'The Death of Mr. Lazarescu'

    August 31, 2012 – September 2, 2012, 8:45 pm

    This ode to mortality--the key work of the new Romanian cinema--is not without a certain grim humor one might call deadpan.

  • 'Beasts of the Southern Wild'

    Ongoing

    No recent American independent film has generated more festival excitement than this exuberant faux folktale.

  • 'Almayer's Folly'

    August 10, 2012 – August 16, 2012

    A new feature by Chantal Akerman is an event and New York is fortunate to have Anthology Film Archives to give her latest movie a run.

  • 'The Leopard'

    August 11, 2012 – August 12, 2012

    Mutilated on its initial American release, this sumptuous historical drama—more pageant than action film, less reconstruction than reverie—has an artistry that’s only comprehensible in the uncut Italian version, projected on the big screen.

  • 'Lonesome'

    August 6, 2012, 6:45 pm

    A wonderful celebration of 1920s New York, Paul Fejos’s charming partial-talkie is also a poignant evocation of anonymity amid the metropolitan crowd.

  • 'Bonsái'

    July 13, 2012 – July 19, 2012

    With its shabby locations, deadpan exchanges, and a lively indie-rock score, Bonsái is a small, grounded cumulatively poignant tragicomedy of student-boho life.

  • 'Daisies'

    July 6, 2012 – July 12, 2012

    The most drolly anarchic cine-provocation to bloom during the Prague Spring, Vera Chytilova’s new wave farce looks better every year.

  • 'The Wedding March'

    July 9, 2012, 7 pm

    You owe it to yourself to see more silent movies, especially in archival prints with live musical accompaniment. This is Erich von Stroheim’s other mutilated masterpiece.

  • 'Funny Face'

    June 29, 2012 – July 5, 2012

    The last great, unself-conscious Hollywood musical features Audrey Hepburn playing a beat chick among the fashionistas, Fred Astaire dancing, and cabaret madcap Kay Thompson clowning.

  • 'Valerie and Her Week of Wonders'

    June 29, 2012, 9 pm

    Made in the traumatized aftermath of the Prague Spring, Jaromil Jireš’s phantasmagoric Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) is one of the strangest movies ever made in Eastern Europe.

  • 'Barry Lyndon'

    June 22, 2012 – June 27, 2012, 12:15 pm

    This cerebral, melancholy action film could be Kubrick’s masterpiece; it certainly represents the height of his craft.

  • Tepepa…Long Live the Revolution

    June 16, 2012, 7:30 pm

    Franco Solinas, who wrote Battle of Algiers, provided a script for Guilio Petroni’s Tepepa…Long Live the Revolution (1969) as though adapting The Wretched of the Earth.

  • 'A New Leaf'

    June 10, 2012, 3:30 pm

    For her first feature, writer-director Elaine May cast herself as a dithering schlemiel. A New Leaf (1971) is a devastating psychodrama, masquerading as amiable dark comedy.

  • Tepepa…Long Live the Revolution

    June 3, 2012, 5:20 pm

    Franco Solinas, who wrote Battle of Algiers, provided a script for Guilio Petroni’s Tepepa…Long Live the Revolution (1969) as though adapting The Wretched of the Earth.

  • Werner Schroeter Retrospective

    May 27, 2012, 5:30 pm

    The most over stimulating day of MoMA’s Werner Schroeter retrospective features consecutive screenings of two echt underground features by the German equivalent of Jack Smith.