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

• Three Critics, One List, 10 Best: J. Hoberman, Robert Wilonsky and Scott Foundas put their minds together and come up with their favorite films of the year. Let's hear it for teamwork!

  published December 23, 2009

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

• Best of the Decade: Our film reviewers recap their favorites of the last ten years

  published December 23, 2009

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

• The year's 10 best movies and more: 2009 in film!

  published December 23, 2009

  Three Village Voice Media critics agree: More >>

• Money Isn't Everything: And all that glitters — Avatar, specifically — isn't gold

  published December 16, 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 >>

• Standing O: Richard Linklater's Orson Welles puts on quite a show

  published December 16, 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 >>

• Middle-of-the-Road: Neither horrific nor disasterrific, this Cormac McCarthy adaptation takes the path of least resistance

  published November 25, 2009

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

• Choice Cuts: The St. Louis International Film Festival's eighteenth year brings together films shot around the world and in our back yard

  published November 12, 2009

  St. Louis came down with a wicked case of Clooneymania earlier this year when the superstar, along with director Jason Reitman, used our fair... More >>

• Got Your Goat: We don't mean to sound paranoid, but: Did aliens abduct George Clooney's sense of humor?

  published November 4, 2009

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

• Pain Is Not Pleasure: Lars von Trier puts his match-made-in-Hell couple, and his audience, through the ringer

  published October 28, 2009

  Lars von Trier's doggedly outrageous, fearsomely ambitious two-hander is so desperate to make you feel something — if only a terrible... More >>

• Let the Mild Rumpus Start! Max and the gang's all here, but Spike Jonze can't quite get the spirit of the Wild Things onscreen

  published October 14, 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 toughest... More >>

• Tone Poem: More harmonious than tumultuous, Bright Star is an ode to John Keats' great love affair

  published September 23, 2009

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

• Family Business: Papa Coppola returns, successfully, to the clan

  published September 16, 2009

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

• Quentin's Final Solution!: In a triumph of his will, Tarantino makes Holocaust revisionism ridiculously fun

  published August 19, 2009

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

• Totally Gay for You: Sacha Baron Cohen's in queerface. But what's Brüno's real target?

  published July 8, 2009

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

• Beautiful Losers: Rudo y Cursi is not the kind of sports movie where everyone wins

  published June 17, 2009

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

• Dead Bodies, Buried Ledes: Political thriller State of Play is adrenaline for a dying industry: Ours

  published April 15, 2009

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

• RegularFellas: The Average Giuseppes of organized crime in Gomorrah

  published March 25, 2009

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

• Dr. Manhattan, Meet Dr. Hollywood: Whew! Tinseltown's go-to graphic novel guy didn't ruin Watchmen. But he doesn't get it either.

  published March 4, 2009

  The most eagerly anticipated (as well as the most beleaguered) movie of the year (if not the century), Watchmen is neither desecratory... More >>

• Dogs of War: Waltz with Bashir is both documentary and animated feature — and a remarkable bubbling up of repressed violence

  published February 18, 2009

  Ari Folman's broodingly original Waltz with Bashir is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated... More >>

• Lady with the Little Dog: Kelly Reichardt's modest but cosmic Wendy and Lucy

  published January 21, 2009

  Sometimes, less really is more. Modest but cosmic, Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy is a movie whose sad pixie heroine, Wendy (Michelle... More >>