J. Hoberman

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The New York Times, Variety, Village Voice
For 976 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 39% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 58% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.3 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

J. Hoberman's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Alphaville
Lowest review score: 0 A Hole in My Heart
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 590 out of 976
  2. Mixed: 312 out of 976
  3. Negative: 74 out of 976
976 movie reviews
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per page
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    No Man's Land
    A mordant battlefield allegory with an absurdist edge.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Good Morning, Night
    Like its oxymoronic title, Good Morning, Night is sober yet filled with fancy. There's a wistful aspect to the movie.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Lives of Others
    A compelling thriller but an unsatisfying character drama.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Happy-Go-Lucky
    At the very least, the spectacle of Poppy's devotion and desire, not to mention her all-around sunny disposish, left this viewer feeling unaccountably happy--at least for the moment.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Mother
    For all its jarring sound design and herky-jerky pacing, founded on sudden incidents or shocking accidents, Mother is deftly plotted, applying Hitchcockian suspense with a Hitchcockian sense of fair play.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Burn After Reading
    The Coens return to familiar territory with the parody thriller Burn After Reading, a characteristically supercilious and crisply shot clown show filled with cartoon perfs and predicated on extravagant stupidity.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Mondovino
    Nossiter has an eye for stray details and a knack for relaxing his subjects- although the scene with the naked guy trampling his own grapes may make you sorry that you ever gave up drinking Ripple.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Frida
    Swank and splashy as it is, Frida leaves the lurking suspicion that Taymor might have preferred to stage her pageant as a puppet show.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Brown Bunny
    It's genuinely elemental, embarrassingly sincere. You can't accuse Gallo of pandering to anyone but himself. Not just a one-man band, he is his own entourage -- and likely to remain so. And that anguished solipsism seems to be, at least in part, the movie's subject.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Bunny Lake Is Missing
    The movie has its share of logical inconsistencies, although to dwell on them is to ignore its deliberate ambiguities and considerable panache.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
    Inexplicable as it is, the Joan of Arc story encourages contemplation of ourselves as a species. The Messenger is more apt to prompt meditation on the nature of show business.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Rambo
    A sort of parody "Apocalypse Now," complete with listless coochie dancers entertaining the Burmese troops, the movie finds its own heart of darkness once Rambo drops the doctors in Burma.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Holy Land
    This broadly acted first feature is exceedingly direct, appropriately sordid, and at times, almost delicate.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Ister
    The headiest, head-scratching-est, damnedest, most demanding movie opening this week in New York, The Ister could be simply described as a philosophical travelogue.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    I Heart Huckabees
    There's more than a bit of Charlie Kaufman to the heady premise, although the scenario doesn't double back on itself--except perhaps in the joke of having Schwartzman's actual mother, Talia Shire, play his mother on-screen.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Black Dahlia
    Although the action set pieces are impressive, the exposition is sluggish. For all the posh dollies, high angles, and Venetian-blind crisscross patterns, The Black Dahlia rarely achieves the rhapsodic (let alone the delirious).
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Up and Down
    Up and Down is not exactly the toughest movie on the block, but especially compared to most American comedies, it conveys a sense of scrofulous rue.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Go
    A showy exercise in nervous grit, Go never strays too far from a sense of itself as stunt.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    This Film Is Not Yet Rated
    Any investigation into Hollywood inevitably mutates into a noir.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Jindabyne
    Hand it to Lawrence and Christian. Jindabyne is a soberly, if sluggishly, crafted movie in which the bitterness never stops.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Free Radicals
    An intelligent, viscerally intellectual exercise in ensemble acting and associative montage, enlivened with some terrific visual and dramatic ideas.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Octubre
    There's a message here regarding loneliness and emotional isolation, but the movie's real miracle is that, however precious its premise, this slow-burning not-quite heart-warmer-never succumbs to cuteness.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Ushpizin
    As directed by Gidi Dar, Ushpizin has a disarming folk quality.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Decay of Fiction
    The Decay of Fiction is less a narrative than a monument. In its abstract movie-ness, this 74-minute carnival of souls exudes a wistful longing to connect, not so much with Hollywood history as with the history of that history.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Pied Piper
    More affecting than affected.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Inside Man
    Inside Man certainly functions as a genre film, but the backbeat of inane banter and schoolyard trash-talking serves to promote an infectious sense of levity.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Fast Food Nation
    A more materialist (and successful) ensemble film than the mystical "Babel," in that everyone is connected through the same economic system, Fast Food Nation is exotic for being a movie about work.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Drive
    Basically, Drive is a song of courtly love and devotion among the automatons. It's a machine, but it works.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Delirious
    Agently attitudinous, generally zippy urban fairy tale about pop stars and the hangers-on who coddle (or prey upon) them, Tom DiCillo's Delirious is a mild "Midnight Cowboy," a minor "King of Comedy," and mainly a vehicle for Steve Buscemi as a lower Manhattan–based paparazzo.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Way of the Gun
    Way of the Gun is a self-consciously American odyssey.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Solaris (1972)
    The most pop film the great Russian filmmaker ever made.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
    Opens with a montage of the press in full operational mode, spewing out newspapers all but automatically for a fleet of waiting delivery trucks. It's a system at once efficient and cumbersome, ultra-modern yet quaint, that suggests nothing so much as a herd of dinosaurs, oblivious to the threat of impending extinction.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Silent Souls
    Dour yet affirmative, this laconic, deliberately paced, beautifully shot movie seeks the archaic in the ordinary - and, though somewhat off-putting in its diffidence, largely succeeds.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Afterschool
    Afterschool, the almost frighteningly accomplished first feature made by Antonio Campos when he was 24, is high school as horror show.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    For the Bible Tells Me So
    Daniel Karslake's movie is more human interest than agitprop.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Sisters in Law
    The movie is an absorbing series of one-on-ones. Local courtroom protocol is based on the British system; the law itself appears to be a complicated combination of tribal tradition, Muslim sharia, and government statutes.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Tetro
    For writer-director Coppola, Tetro is a cri de coeur, one more from the heart.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Hero
    Zhang Yimou's impeccably crafted, all-star martial arts extravaganza, is the essence of shallow gravitas.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    World Trade Center
    World Trade Center is Stone's rehabilitation. It's not just courage that's honored, it's God's Will. It isn't only men who are saved, it's their families -- and their family values.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    World on a Wire (1973)
    A bit of a slog at 205 minutes, World on a Wire builds up to a satisfyingly nutty finale.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Delicatessen
    Delicatessen may be junk food, but it's served with the discretion of nouvelle cuisine. [07 Apr 1992]
    • Village Voice
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    What's surprising is the atmosphere of sweet reason--elatively speaking--that distinguishes Kill Bill Vol. 2 from its bloody precursor.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Hamlet
    Stylish, funny, and smart...but only up to a point.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Spider-Man
    Mildly cheesy but not overwrought, this long-awaited future franchise is a competent seat-warmer at the box-office table for the two weekends preceding George Lucas's "Attack of the Clones."
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Gunner Palace
    Floating on the surface of confusion, Gunner Palace has a raw home video quality that's often quite beautiful. Much of the movie is hardly more than an immersion in sights and sounds. Vivid as it is, Gunner Palace is dominated by what isn't shown. It's the human face of Abu Ghraib.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    4
    Although Khrzhanovsky has several tricks up his sleeve, 4's most provocative quality is its ironic surplus of beauty.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Hollywoodland
    Props then to Affleck. Coulter contrived a neat behavioral trick by inducing his star to play a comparably big-jawed bad actor. Surrounded as he is by canny professionals--Lane, Hoskins, Smith, and Jeffrey DeMunn as an unctuous glad-handing agent--it's an unexpectedly touching performance.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Quiet American
    In short, this new Quiet American is not only true to Greene's novel -- it has the effect of making the novel itself seem truer than it has ever been.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Summer Hours
    Too chatty to be ascetic, Summer Hours is nevertheless almost Ozu-like in its evocation of a parent's death and the dissolving bond between the surviving children. It's also an essay on the nature of sentimental and real value--as well as the need to protect French culture in a homogenizing world.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Friday Night
    Richer in metaphor than narrative drive.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Straight Story
    Sunny as The Straight Story appears, Lynch is still defamiliarizing the normal.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Matrix Reloaded
    Where The Matrix was a heady cocktail of gnostic Zen Philip K. Dick cyberpunk '60s psychedelic bull, well spiked with high-octane digitally driven Hong Kong action pyrotechnics, those elements reloaded soon separate out. The refreshing draft of effervescent movie magic leaves a sludgy sediment of metaphysics.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Decomposition of the Soul
    The Decomposition of the Soul is a deliberately confining movie, but unlike "The Lives of Others," it offers no closure.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Exiled
    By Hong Kong standards, To's policiers have been fairly down-to-earth, but Exiled--which begins with a tribute to Sergio Leone and ends by acknowledging Sam Peckinpah--exists solely in the world of the movies.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Corporation
    A leisurely, never boring, grimly amusing, and not entirely hopeless disquisition on the contemporary world's "dominant institution."
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Farewell, Home Sweet Home
    The movie exudes a cheerful energy--laying out a deck of narrative cards, then reshuffling them in the final 10 minutes.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Host
    Gross-out horror is never far from comedy and The Host, Bong Joon-ho's giddy creature feature, has an anarchic mess factor worthy of a pile of old "Mad" magazines.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Life During Wartime
    Todd Solondz is back. Life During Wartime shows the misanthropic moralizer as confounding and trigger-happy as ever, his big clown thumb poised over a garish assortment of hot buttons--race, suicide, autism, sexual misery, self-hatred, Israel, and, his old favorite, pedophilia.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
    Everything about this berserk, essentially static procedural is just crazy enough to be true. In any case, Herzog has gone beyond Good and Evil to reinvent himself as a candidate for the wiggiest director of comedy in America today.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Party
    It’s the tension between Sellers’s inane tact and the general tastelessness of his surroundings that gives the movie its zing.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Lumumba
    As cliché-rich as it is compelling.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Amen.
    Costa-Gavras provides a post-war postscript to make clear that honesty is punished; cynicism survives.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Holy Smoke
    Filled with flashy sight gags, overwrought performances, and madly overlapping dialogue.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Woman on the Beach
    Albeit not as textured as Hong's past few films, Woman on the Beach is no less engrossing--a rueful tale of karmic irony, self-deceived desire, squandered second chances, and unforeseen abandonment.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    City of Life and Death
    City of Life and Death is far more convincing as a spectacle of mass atrocity than a drama of individual conscience.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Of Gods and Men
    Beauvois's film is cool while Denis's is hot-but the main difference is that where "White Material" is knowingly postcolonial, Of Gods and Men aspires to the timeless.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Rock Star
    Raking over the same clichés as "Almost Famous," Rock Star is far less reverential -- it isn't burdened by generational nostalgia and doesn't take itself too seriously.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Why We Fight
    Jarecki's film forcefully argues that the much abused word FREEDOM cannot paper over the conflicts between capitalism and democracy.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Examined Life
    Ideas beam out from Astra Taylor's engaging new philoso-doc Examined Life; the viewer basks in the intelligence on-screen and, occasionally, soaks up the rays.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Baader Meinhof Complex
    The movie is a sweeping, hectic docudrama that would have been immeasurably helped by the use of informational intertitles.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    12:08 East of Bucharest
    A casually bleak and neatly structured ensemble comedy--at once deadpan and bemused.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Massoud, the Afghan
    It's not the least of Afghan tragedies that this noble warlord would be consigned to the dustbin of history.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Point Blank
    No good deed goes unpunished in former fashion photographer Fred Cavayé's cunningly contrived, energetically directed, thoroughly economical second feature.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Duck, You Sucker
    As ambitious as it is anachronistic, Duck, You Sucker demands to be read through the prism of World War II as well as 1968. Could this be the last movie in the great Italian tradition that began in 1945?
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    21 Grams
    Watts, who has the most difficult scenes, is splendidly mercurial; what's surprising is that those professional storm clouds Penn and Del Toro are here as powerfully restrained as she is electrifying.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Extract
    The movie is characterized by its crisp, cutting, classical framing, and comic timing. The style and approach recall classic Albert Brooks. Indeed, the beleaguered, cuckolded Joel would have been a great role for the young Brooks--adding a certain self-aggrandizing je ne sais quoi or a neurotic zetz that the appealing, but bland, Bateman lacks.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Everyone Else
    An exercise in voyeurism, Maren Ade's provocatively titled, superbly performed, emotionally graphic Everyone Else is more fascinating than enjoyable.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Magdalene Sisters
    This shocker is often shameless, not least in the climactic confrontation with Sister Bridget, but it's impossible not to be moved by the ending -- if only because the torture is finally over.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Piano Teacher
    The Piano Teacher's study in lurid sexual pathology occasions a tour de force by Isabelle Huppert as the title character.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Heaven
    An art film without the NYFF imprimatur, Heaven is a peculiar amalgam -- a Miramax package (without the hype), directed by German hotshot Tom Tykwer under the eye of Anthony Minghella, from a script with which the late Krzysztof Kieslowski had planned to inaugurate a new trilogy named for the Divine Comedy.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle
    It's a measure of the movie's success that one oscillates between two despairs-noting the abject failure of the system and the utter futility of revolt.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Anatomy of Hell
    Anatomy of Hell gives a feminist twist to a French literary tradition that goes back to the Marquis de Sade. It's also svelte, assured filmmaking.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Social Network
    Corny as that is, the film's nadir comes when Zuckerberg's pretty young lawyer comforts him (or us) with the mealy-mouthed observation, "You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying so hard to be one."
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Tokyo Godfathers
    A welcome exercise in anime weirdness.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    Less a tale of desperado lovers than a cruel story of youth, Tout de Suite is framed largely in close-up, with few transitional shots and a narrative that grows increasingly fragmented.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Great Race
    Natalie Wood is on hand as a cheroot-smoking suffragist (with a phenomenal wardrobe), but the movie is largely powered by Lemmon’s energy, roaring like Jackie Gleason as the bombastic Professor Fate and later appearing as his double, the klutzy crown prince of a Ruritanian kingdom.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Demonlover
    However glitzy, clever, and luridly philosophical, Demonlover is still mainly an old-fashioned thriller.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Tamara Drewe
    Frears might have accelerated the comic pacing, but the story is a good one and events come nicely to a boil.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    I'm Going Home
    Restrained, precise, and unobtrusively wry.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Girl Cut in Two
    A Girl Cut in Two is a spry piece of work. Chabrol uses this sinister clown show as a means to puncture the media world's hot-air balloons--as well as to highlight the hypocrisies of his favorite target, the haute bourgeoisie.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Go Go Tales
    A highly personal movie, Go Go Tales finds Ferrara in a frenzied yet pensive mode.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Enigma
    Doesn't coddle the audience. But neither does it play fair. The narrative takes several fast turns and stops short with the sudden introduction of new material; the exposition is hurried and lazily predicated on characters' thinking aloud.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Ali
    Filled with vivid cameos and set to an infectious soul beat that effectively covers the underlying hum of calculated precision.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Paradise Now
    Paradise Now suffers from some odd continuity glitches and takes a few too many narrative curves en route to an overly convoluted ending, but the heart of the movie is as tense as the bus ride in Hitchcock's "Sabotage."
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    The Road to Guantanamo
    One of the most oppressive accounts of life in a military detention since Jonas Mekas's "documentary" version of The Brig or Peter Watkins's Punishment Park.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Encounters at the End of the World
    Perhaps because Herzog is approaching old-master status, Encounters at the End of the World skews toward the observational. As in "Grizzly Man," his 2005 portrait of a deranged bear lover, Herzog seems at least as fascinated with other people's obsessions as his own.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Please Give
    It is, for the most part, witty and engrossing.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    ABC Africa
    The emphasis in this surprisingly cheerful film is on the resilience of the living.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Les amants criminels
    May be as gimmicky as Ozon's other features, but it's also more resonant and even haunting.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 J. Hoberman
    Three Times
    My first impression of Three Times was that it was high middling Hou--conceptually bold but unevenly executed. The movie's implicit themes of time travel, eternal recurrence, and the transmigration of souls seemed as muddied by the director's devotion to Shu as they were dissipated in the confusion of the final present-day section. But Three Times improves on a second viewing.
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