J. Hoberman

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 Wachowski, have taken another step toward the total cyborganization of the cinema. Warner Bros. Pictures (Click to enlarge) Candy Land Reloaded Even......

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 circled around a single, unrepresentable event — the death of a cop on a lonely stretch of......

Danny Williams, subject of Esther Robinson’s documentary portrait A Walk Into the Sea, was a ’60s casualty. His brief life derives cultural significance from his association with the Silver Age of the Warhol Factory — and a particular poignance in that the survivors of that epoch barely remember him. A......

GO  FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON The Red Balloon was the art-house E.T. of 1956. Flight of the Red Balloon is something far more baffling — a literal-minded movie with an amiably free-floating metaphor. Chinese grandmaster Hou Hsiao-hsien, who only screened The Red Balloon after he was commissioned to remake......

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 horizons rather than his girth. Paraphrasing the title of a venerable computer game, Where in the World......

The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant’s masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film’s narrative structure but reflects the arc of its maker’s career. Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor. Van Sant’s debut, the 1985 Mala Noche, was a moody drizzle of......

Back in the day, literal-minded audiences had great fun pretending to be baffled by this artiest of European art films. Basically, Last Year at Marienbad, which Resnais directed from an original screenplay by "new novelist" Alain Robbe-Grillet, is a situation. The politely avid X (Giorgio Albertazzi) pursues the mysteriously diffident......

After seven editions, the almost-traditional Village Voice poll of alt-press (and now other) film critics took a hiatus last year (lotta changes going on around here; maybe you heard). Meanwhile, the L.A. Weekly shouldered the burden of anointing a 37-year-old movie, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows,the Best Movie of 2006......