J. Hoberman Articles

The imbecilization of American movie culture — and, by extension, of American culture itself — continues. The Village Voice, which made Twitter headlines a few months ago when they took on Ashton Kutcher's mathematical illiteracy and assorted logical fallacies, have fired their longtime chief film critic J. Hoberman, one of the rare thoughtful, literate movie commentators out there. Not even Kutcher would've done something so [...]

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho caused a sensation when it opened in June about fifty years ago. There were a number of reasons for that, one of them being the fact that Psycho was seen by some as a sensational, perverse, "cheap" horror flick like those William Castle, a master at promotional gimmicks, was making in the late '50s, e.g., The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill, Macabre. [...]

Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning in The Runaways (top); Noomi Rapace in Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (middle); Ben Stiller in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg (bottom) The Kristen Stewart-Dakota Fanning vehicle The Runaways, the IMAX documentary Hubble 3D, the Noah Baumbach-Ben Stiller collaboration Greenberg, the Swedish crime thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Raymond De Felitta's comedy City Island, and Marco Bellocchio's [...]

Paul Greengrass-Matt Damon's GREEN ZONE Reviews "Similarly, Green Zone comes off as a picture made by a person with a brain as well as a conscience, though the movie's big flaw may be its unblinking insistence that we've been lied to — you don't have to read too much between the lines to see how adamant Greengrass is about that fact, though he isn't telling [...]