J. Hoberman

John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the 1974 spy novel generally regarded as the writer's finest, is predicated on a pair of enigmatic personalities: the colorless, bureaucratic master spook George Smiley and the double agent the Soviets have planted near the top of British intelligence, whom Smiley must unmask......

Steve McQueen's first two films both star Michael Fassbender, feature virtually interchangeable titles, and are nearly as grueling to watch as they must have been to make. But where Shame might be nearly as excruciating as 2008's Hunger, it's a lot less exalted. In Hunger, Fassbender's imprisoned Irish revolutionary Bobby......

A Dangerous Method, the title of David Cronenberg's viscerally cerebral new film, is something of an understatement. As cataclysmic as it is, this historically scrupulous sci-fi romance concerning the discovery of the unconscious mind might have been titled War of the Worlds or The Beast From 5,000 Fathoms. Adapted by......

As life-or-death dramedy, The Descendants poses several important questions: Why has it taken Alexander Payne seven years to follow up on his critically beloved, box-office boffo, Merlot-squelching Sideways? And what has blunted this gifted writer-director's edge? Payne topped his debut feature, the provocatively obnoxious abortion comedy Citizen Ruth (1996), with......

The first thing you see in Lars von Trier's Melancholia is a tight close-up of Kirsten Dunst's face. Behind her, slow as molasses, birds are dropping from the sky. Brueghel's The Flight of Icarus turns leisurely to ash; a passage from Tristan und Isolde swells on the soundtrack as lightning......

Clint Eastwood goes deep into Oliver Stone territory and emerges victorious with J. Edgar. Although hardly flawless, this biopic is his richest, most ambitious movie since the Letters From Iwo Jima-Flags of Our Fathers duo, if not Unforgiven. Does anyone younger than 50 remember the man who more or less......

Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, The Rum Diary adapts a novel Hunter S. Thompson began in the early '60s and published, under Johnny Depp's auspices, more than three decades later. A first-person account of the drinking life on a tropical isle in the late 1950s, its protagonists are mainly......

As taut and economical as its title is unwieldy, Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene — a first feature that won the Best Director award in January at Sundance — is a deft, old-school psychological thriller (or perhaps horror film) that relies mainly on the power of suggestion and memories......

Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre is something of a comeback for the Finnish filmmaker. His warmhearted comedy of underdog working-class solidarity, made with a mixed Finnish-French-Senegalese cast in the French port city Le Havre, was the most warmly received movie — at least by the press — shown last May in......

Russian director Aleksei Fedorchenko's third feature, Silent Souls, evokes Russia's pre-Slavic, pagan past in the form of a meditative road trip taken by two descendants of the ancient Merja people. It's Fedorchenko's premise that, though externally indistinguishable from other Russians, Merjans nevertheless recognize each other and share a common psychic......