J. Hoberman, the former longtime Village Voice film critic, is a monthly film columnist for Tablet Magazine. He is the author, co-author or editor of 12 books, including Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds and, with Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting.

Rama Burshtein’s ‘The Wedding Plan’ Is a Halachically-Approved Fable With a Happy Ending, Maybe

An Orthodox woman’s ill-fated engagement sends Haredi rom-com down the path of blissed-out breakthroughs

By J. Hoberman · May 11, 2017

The Scroll

Gustav Metzger, Pioneer of ‘Auto-Destructive Art’, Dies at 90

In 1939, Metzger escaped the Nazis on a Kindertransport. His radical anti-art, or ‘aesthetics of revulsion,’ often dealt with the rejection of power.

By J. Hoberman · March 9, 2017

An Orthodox woman’s ill-fated engagement sends Haredi rom-com down the path of blissed-out breakthroughs

In 1939, Metzger escaped the Nazis on a Kindertransport. His radical anti-art, or ‘aesthetics of revulsion,’ often dealt with the rejection of power.

Shimon Dotan’s ‘strongly articulated’ political documentary focuses on the fanatics on the front lines of the battle over the land of Israel

Darkness! Angst! Paranoia! In the terrified films of the 1940s and ’50s, written and directed by Jewish refugees, hidden dangers lurk where hell is no longer a fantasy, where what’s false is true, and what’s wrong is even wronger.

The East German-Bulgarian Holocaust movie ‘Sterne,’ screening this weekend at the New York Jewish Film Festival, is one of a group of visceral films made in Communist countries by or with people who survived the war

The year’s can’t-miss releases, from Chantel Akerman’s ‘No Home Movie’ and Maren Ade’s ‘Toni Erdmann,’ to a wordless, cinematic graphic novel about fascism and war fever

Mel Gibson’s ‘Braveheart’ inspires another version of the many versions of the Nat Turner rebellion story, in a rave-capturing new film part Spartacus, part Exodus

The late Marcin Wrona’s dark new Dybbuk parable digs deep into a haunted past

The new documentary ‘Eva Hesse,’ opening this week, explores the too short, too beautiful life of an art heroine

Nearly 85 percent of all Holocaust-themed Oscar nominees—going back to the first, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ (1959)—have received at least one Academy Award

Who stands taller in film history than the legendary head of production for MGM, Irving Thalberg?

Amos Gitai’s polemical new documentary—opening in U.S. theaters Friday—on the 1995 assassination that rocked Israel sacrifices facts in favor of sensation

From Hollywood to Timbuktu, it was a very good year

With brutal tact and appalling artistry, the visceral and haunting ‘Son of Saul’ makes little miracles out of the monstrous

The great French filmmaker died this week, just days before the New York Film Festival premiere of her portrait of her Auschwitz-survivor mother

The internationally acclaimed filmmaker’s new ‘The Kindergarten Teacher’ takes Jewish insularity to terrific extremes

New German film is a devastating portrait of a ghostly young Eurydice, an Auschwitz survivor who refuses to stay in hell

Confessions of a Jewish teenage folkie

Ari Folman’s sci-fi half-animated ‘The Congress,’ David Cronenberg’s horror comedy ‘Maps to the Stars,’ and the end of movies

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Holocaust film takes home an Academy Award

‘The Left Front’ highlights American art made for the Soviet Union’s official “Jewish homeland”

A study in the dangers, and absurdities, of censorship

‘Letters to Afar’ is the latest of an emergent and haunting new form, Jewish material-memory film

The novelist made $25 per review during his 1957 stint at the publication

Alex Ross Perry’s often funny ‘Listen Up Philip’ is as much homage to as critique of the great American writer

Wes Anderson’s ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ and James Gray’s ‘The Immigrant’: period fantasies that shy away from real Jews

Is Pawel Pawlikowski’s new film ‘Ida’ the Polish answer to ‘Aftermath,’ or a story of Jewish suffering and sacrifice?

It rains and rains in the most eccentric Old Testament adaptation, and most Jewish biblical blockbuster, ever made

Claude Lanzmann returns to his greatest subject through footage of a conflicted Elder of Theresienstadt

‘Inside Llewyn Davis,’ opening December 6, pits the existential victim against the very possibility of Jewish success