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

• Avatar: Money Isn’t Everything, and All that Glitters Isn’t Gold

  published December 17, 2009

  The money is on the screen in Avatar, James Cameron's mega-3D, mondo-CGI, more-than-a-quarter-billion-dollar baby, and, like the Hope... More >>

• Richard Linklater’s Orson Welles Puts on Quite a Show

  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 >>

• The Road Takes the Path of Least Resistance

  published November 26, 2009

  The Road, Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning post-apocalyptic survivalist prose poem — in which a father and his 10-year-old... More >>

• The Men Who Stare at Goats: Did Aliens Abduct George Clooney's Sense of Humor?

  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 >>

• Where the Wild Things Are: Spike Jonze Can’t Quite Get Into the Spirit of the Wild Rumpus

  published October 15, 2009

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

• Bright Star: An Ode to John Keats’ Great Love Affair That Is More Harmonious Than Tumultuous

  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 recounts the... More >>

• Tetro: Papa Coppola Returns Successfully to the Clan

  published September 3, 2009

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

• Inglourious Basterds: Tarantino Makes the Nazi Occupation of France Ridiculously Fun

  published August 20, 2009

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

• Despite Its Premise, Humpday Isn’t Really About Gay Sex

  published August 6, 2009

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

• Brüno: Sacha Baron Cohen’s in Queerface, but What’s His Real Target?

  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 York... More >>

• Larry David Can’t Salvage Woody Allen’s Whatever Works

  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 snatch of... More >>

• Rudo Y Cursi is Not the Kind of Sports Movie Where Everyone Wins

  published June 25, 2009

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

• Harvard Beats Yale 29-29: Legendary Ivy League Football Game Documentary Wraps Up the Boomer Era

  published June 4, 2009

  Pundits agree: The 2008 election has finally and forever rung down the curtain on America's longest-running psychodrama, namely the Boomerography,... More >>

• Cannes Film Festival 2009: This Time, It’s Visceral

  published May 28, 2009

  CANNES, France — Memorable for its in-your-face sensationalism, the 62nd Cannes Film Festival opened with the 3-D computer animation... More >>

• Limits of Control: Wandering Spain with Jim Jarmusch’s "Lone Man"

  published May 14, 2009

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

• Examined Life: Astra Taylor Asks Cornel West and Crew to Take on the Big Question

  published May 7, 2009

  "Things," as Dwight D. Eisenhower once observed, "are more like they are now than they have ever been before." But why? Is something better... More >>

• State of Play’s Political Thrill Ride Is Adrenaline for a Dying Industry: Ours

  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 >>

• Gomorrah: The Average Giuseppes of Organized Crime

  published April 9, 2009

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

• Zack Snyder Directed Watchmen, but He Doesn’t Get It

  published March 5, 2009

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

• Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy is Modest but Cosmic

  published February 26, 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 >>

• Steven Soderbergh’s Two Che Guevara Films in One Four-Hour Sitting Make for a One-Ton Guerrilla

  published February 5, 2009

  And so the endless campaign wraps up with a flurry of virtual leaders. Richard Nixon will always be part of America's dreamlife, with or without... More >>

• Waltz with Bashir Is a Remarkable Bubbling Up of Repressed Violence

  published January 22, 2009

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

• In The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke and Darren Aronofsky Make Visceral Comebacks

  published January 8, 2009

  The Wrestler may be plenty visceral, but it's no more a sports movie than professional wrestling is a competitive sport. Chronic... More >>