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Army of One

A Russian grandmother visits the troops, and brings light to their misguided mission in Chechnya.

By J. Hoberman

Published: May 28, 2008

Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in general and the Russian occupation of Chechnya in...

Film Feature

Cannes Class of 2008

A jury divided unites around Laurent Cantet's schoolhouse drama

By J. Hoberman

Published: May 28, 2008

CANNES, France—Wading through 20-odd movies in half as many languages, each Cannes jury supplies its own dramatic narrative, to be interpreted according to its president's presumed taste....

Film Feature

Shots in the Dark

Reflecting its moment, Cannes 2008 takes a decidedly serious tone

By J. Hoberman

Published: May 21, 2008

CANNES, France—No need for dreaming here. Each Cannes Film Festival generates its own metaphors for a 10-day regimen of visions in the dark. It's impossible to forget, let alone transcend,...

Film Feature

Presenting the only Cannes awards that really matter: Ours.

By J. Hoberman

Published: May 21, 2008

CANNES, France—The competition for the Palme d'Or is ongoing as I write, but the story of the 61st Cannes Film Festival is Steven Soderbergh's two-part, four-and-a-half-hour Che —an...

Film

Floating Life

Hou Hsiao-hsien and his red balloon watch over a lonely mother and son in this soaring Flight.

By J. Hoberman

Published: May 14, 2008

About a thousand movies ago, I made the truculent, unprovable assertion that if Chinese grandmaster Hou Hsiao-hsien were French, he'd be a household name. Now the moment of truth arrives with...

Film

Get Out of Jail Free

Errol Morris cuts the Abu Ghraib MPs some slack in Standard Operating Procedure.

By J. Hoberman

Published: May 7, 2008

It's been 20 years since Errol Morris made The Thin Blue Line , a found "noir" that served to free an innocent man convicted of murder. Gathering evidence and dramatizing testimony, Morris' movie...

Film

Fast Track to Nowhere

It's anime on overdrive in the Wachowski brothers' souped-up, tricked-out Speed Racer.

By J. Hoberman

Published: May 7, 2008

Converting a fondly remembered cartoon series — one of the first Japanese animes syndicated on American TV — into a prospective franchise, the Matrix masters, Larry and Andy...

Film

Mamet's new film, Redbelt , showing at the SF International Film Fest

By J. Hoberman

Published: April 30, 2008

David Mamet's Redbelt is a tricky bar brawl — call it Roundhouse of Games . The writer-director has scarcely abandoned his sense of the movies as an innately duplicitous medium, one best...

Feature

Best of the Fest

Our critics' recommendations from this year's films.

By J. Hoberman

Published: April 23, 2008

Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia) Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in...

Film

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World

Leaving no gimmick unturned, that Super Size Me guy goes searching for Public Enemy No. 1.

By J. Hoberman

Published: April 16, 2008

Morgan Spurlock, the daredevil documentarian who lived on Big Macs for a month and turned this exercise in "body art" into the 2004 hit Super Size Me , returns — this time expanding his...

Film

Hot on Arrival

Asia Argento predictably hijacks Boarding Gate, a flight that's otherwise a bumpy ride.

By J. Hoberman

Published: April 9, 2008

There's basically only one reason to see Olivier Assayas' self-consciously hypermodern, metasleazy, English-French-Chinese-language globo-thriller Boarding Gate , and her name is Asia Argento....

Film

Sk8ter Boi

Gus Van Sant returns to disaffected youth and shoestring budgets in Paranoid Park.

By J. Hoberman

Published: March 12, 2008

The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant's masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film's narrative structure, it also reflects the arc of its maker's career. Few directors have...

FilmCap

CJ7

By J. Hoberman

Published: March 5, 2008

Something of a departure for Hong Kong's reigning master of special-effects slapstick Stephen Chow, CJ7 is a father-son fable transparently modeled on Steven Spielberg's ET . Chow plays a...

Film

Judgment Days

The circus of the '60s, from the streets to the courtroom, in Chicago 10.

By J. Hoberman

Published: February 27, 2008

The Democratic insurgent is the most charismatic candidate since RFK, and the party's convention could be the most convulsive since the debacle in Chicago. The Vietnam War has returned in the...

Film

California Burning

An epic gusher, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood strikes oil, and then some

By J. Hoberman

Published: January 9, 2008

A great brooding thundercloud of a movie, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood arrives as if from nowhere on a gust of critical acclaim, lowering over a landscape of barren mesas and hot,...

Feature

Hit List

The top movies of 2007

By J. Hoberman

Published: December 26, 2007

It's that time of year again. Our six critics don't always (or often) agree, but we've combined their top 10 lists (allowing for ties) to pretend they do! So without further ado, the 10 (or 15)...

Film

Mr. Schrader Goes to Washington

A gay escort finds himself at the center of a classic D.C. scandal in The Walker

By J. Hoberman

Published: December 12, 2007

Paul Schrader's cinema is largely defined by the pathology of his male protagonists, and with The Walker , he's added a striking new character to his gallery of loners. Carter Page III (Woody...

Film

Those Were the Days

Coppola romanticizes his source material in the not entirely terrible Youth Without Youth

By J. Hoberman

Published: December 12, 2007

Youth Without Youth , Francis Ford Coppola's self-financed return to the fray, is a curious project — well-crafted, personal, and movie-movie old-fashioned even in its vanguard aspirations....

Film

Like a Complete Unknown

By J. Hoberman

Published: November 21, 2007

I'm Not There and the changing face of Bob Dylan on film. I'm Not There is the movie of the year — but to whom does Todd Haynes's Bob Dylan biopic actually belong, and when was it...

Film

Richard Kelly Follows Donnie Darko with Terrorizing Southland Tales

By J. Hoberman

Published: November 14, 2007

A doom-ridden pulp cabalist with a dark sense of purpose as well as humor, Richard Kelly shoots the moon with Southland Tales , his rich, strange, and very funny sci-fi social satire. Kelly's...