J. Hoberman

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.

The Waiting Rooms of History

Godard’s Conflagration of Images

A head-scratcher and a mind-bender, The Image Book—the latest film by eighty-eight-year-old Jean-Luc Godard—is gloriously obscure and brutally unpretty, yet lucid and even gorgeous all the same.

‘Night of the Living Dead’ and 1968

The quintessential 1968 movie then and now remains Night of the Living Dead, a film whose meaning was created by its audience—or rather audiences—as it short-circuited established patterns of publicity and exhibition.

The House of Anderson

Bauhaus in Mexico

Not long after their arrival to the United States, the Bauhaus instructors Josef and Anni Albers went looking for America and found it… in Mexico.

Art in a Time of Terror

For the most part, “Age of Terror: Art since 9/11” is sobering, serious stuff. Some have argued that art is simply unequal to the magnitude of the event. But isn’t that a given? Artists cannot recreate September 11, only respond to it.

Acting Natural

The motion picture camera changed the nature of acting. Among other things, it created that apparent oxymoron, the non-actor, the subject of an unusually rich and stimulating series now at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.