J. Hoberman

Framing Babyn Yar

Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries, sourced from archival propaganda, have drawn criticism for what they do not show.

Romanian Masquerades

In Radu Jude’s ‘Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn,’ Bucharest is half built and half derelict—a semiotic jungle and a ruin waiting to happen.

A Conceptual Artist of Cinema

Now ninety-two, the Canadian filmmaker Michael Snow is receiving a retrospective of a career that brought a playful avant-garde sensibility to the moving image.

The Marvel of Comics, If Not of Movies

“However technologically wondrous, Hollywood films are less interesting to me than they’ve ever been. I never want to have to see, or have an opinion about, another superhero.”

Marvel’s Ringmaster

Under Stan Lee’s guidance, Marvel marketed not only its characters but also the men who created them.

‘Undine’ Retold

With its haunting indifference to logic, German director Christian Petzold’s version of the myth is a study of the ways in which men and women misunderstand one another.

Fantastic Fixation in ‘Photo Brut’

Ingenuity and obsession characterize this disquieting and uplifting exhibition of self-taught photographers.

The ‘Lost World’ of Vittorio De Seta

These luminous shorts depicting the hardscrabble lives of fishermen, shepherds, peasants, and miners in rural Italy turn documentary into art film.

Revenge of the Has-Been

Mank is no documentary but a semifactual yarn that burnishes the legend of the showboat, nasty wit, and habitual roisterer who wrote Citizen Kane.

Fall Films to Stream

William Greaves’s documentary about the 1972 National Black Political Convention, Werner Schroeter’s Malina, and a caper by King Hu.

Self-Made Men

An Invented Artist's Lively Inventions

An artist is a person who invents an artist. The American photographer Stephen Berkman could be said to have taken this literally.

Films to Stream

More virtual summer is provided by the Criterion Channel, which is streaming its comprehensive collection of Olympic films from Stockholm 1912 to London 2012.

My Quarantine: Cannes, Interrupted

Lockdown possibility for a new cinematic discovery: the Russian writer-director Kantemir Balagov, a protégé of the last Soviet master Alexander Sokurov, not yet thirty and possibly the most arresting young filmmaker to emerge in the last few years.

April Films to Watch at Home

J. Hoberman’s monthly film roundup, usually a selection of what to see in theaters, now offers films that can be streamed online while readers are staying at home because of the pandemic. 

Lapid’s Complaint

“Let the Jews find their Jerusalem in France,” so Napoleon said. It’s a proposition that Nadav Lapid’s quasi-autobiographical new film, Synonyms, takes literally, dropping an alienated Israeli expat down in France. Or at least inside a French movie.

Tarantino’s Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino’s new movie is a fetish object as well as a film, as much curated as it is directed.

Ronald Reagan’s Reel Life

Did the movies ever matter? They did to Ronald Reagan.

Barbara Rubin, Shameless Angel of the Avant-Garde

Barbara Rubin may have been something less than a great artist, but she was also something more. Rubin was a wild child and a force of nature whose drug-fueled trajectory through the Sixties counterculture is the subject of Chuck Smith’s new documentary Barbara Rubin and the Exploding New York Underground.

The Ominous Decadence of ‘Sunset’

Sunset, the forty-two-year-old French-Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes’s follow-up to his astonishing 2015 debut Son of Saul, is a gothic melodrama and a modernist period piece set on the eve of World War I and shadowed by impending doom.