J. Hoberman

The phrase over the top doesn't begin to characterize Polish director Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 Possession. Made with an international cast in still-divided Berlin, the movie starts as an unusually violent breakup film, takes an extremely yucky turn toward Repulsion-style psychological breakdown, escalates into the avant-garde splatterific body horror of the......

The greatest red documentary filmmaker of the 1920s, the greatest documentary filmmaker of the '20s, the greatest filmmaker ... ever? In the alternate universe where vision trumps commerce and formal innovation displaces narrative, Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) rivals Stan Brakhage and Oscar Micheaux as supreme inventor of motion-picture form. Vertov —......

In the late 1960s, when Jean-Luc Godard was at the acme of his influence, Manny Farber concluded an enthusiastic if grudging appreciation with a litany of Godard's faults ("I think that I shall never see scenes with more sleep-provoking powers, or hear so many big words that tell me nothing")......

Click here for "Godard's '60s Revisited: The Rebirth of Cool," by Karina Longworth. Jean-Luc Godard changed the course of film history with his debut, Breathless (1960), and then again when he capped an unprecedented seven-year run with his 14th feature, Weekend. Less an individual movie than the culmination of a......

A Separation — the fifth feature by Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi — is an urgently shot courtroom drama designed to put you in the jury box. Dispensing with preliminaries, it opens at a judicial hearing where, both facing the camera that stands in for the judge, a quarrelsome husband and......

"A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees," per William Blake. Ain't that the truth! Although listed by barely half of the 95 participating voters, Terrence Malick's polarizing The Tree of Life sits comfortably atop the 2011 Film Critics' Poll. Part Brakhage, part Tarkovsky, part Captain......

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is hardly a personal project. Still, David Fincher's sveltely malevolent remake of the 2009 Swedish blockbuster directed by Niels Arden Oplev from Stieg Larsson's rambling thriller, a posthumously published international best-seller and Kindle record-holder, is a recognizably Fincherian caper. The movie, which opens with......

It might be perverse to accuse a tearjerker as accomplished as Steven Spielberg of being unfeeling. But the overcalculation with which he mechanically trots out one of his most familiar tropes for what amounts to a generic Disney animal story seems to preclude any but the most hackneyed emotion. What......

Described as a "psychotic prom-queen bitch," the antiheroine of Young Adult is a prize part that affords Charlize Theron one of the season's prize performances. Theron established her bona fides and won an Oscar playing a serial killer in Monster; Young Adult, directed by Jason Reitman from Diablo Cody's screenplay,......