J. Hoberman

J. Hoberman was the longtime Village Voice film critic. 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.

Sympathy for the Devil
The superstar of old-school terrorism seizes the spotlight in Olivier Assayas’ ‘Carlos’
byJ. Hoberman
The Giant
A new exhibit showcases the work of Diane Arbus, surrealist ethnographer and the greatest portrait photographer of her generation
byJ. Hoberman
The Velvet Underground & Todd Haynes
The filmmaker’s latest is as much about ’60s New York as it is about the iconic band, whose debut album will celebrate its 55th anniversary Saturday
byJ. Hoberman
Shoah Unshowable
The posthumous debuts of two post-Auschwitz artists, and the barbarism of making art in a broken world
byJ. Hoberman
Life With a Star
The 1949 Czech film ‘Distant Journey’ was one of the first movies to dramatize the Shoah. Banned for decades and recently restored, its depiction of Nazi horrors is still one of the most striking.
byJ. Hoberman
Uptight
Black History Month: Jules Dassin’s militantly Black 1968 movie echoes American social tumult today
byJ. Hoberman
Sunday Streamers
Tablet’s film critic proposes five Jewish film-canon essentials to watch at home: a noir, a poetic horror flick, two examples of the 1960s Jew Wave, and a crime story
byJ. Hoberman
The Esthers: Top 10 Jewish Films of 2020
This year, as cinemas shut down, Tablet’s critic found streaming lockdown escapist gems in clever counterhistories, rich and inventive documentaries, and rediscovered classics of Yiddish cinema. And Roy Cohn.
byJ. Hoberman
‘If You Could Lick My Heart It Would Poison You’
Is Pawel Pawlikowski’s new film ‘Ida’ the Polish answer to ‘Aftermath,’ or a story of Jewish suffering and sacrifice?
byJ. Hoberman
American Pickle
Seth Rogen commits Jew-on-Jew violence in a subversive new film
byJ. Hoberman
My Roy Cohn, and Ours
Two recent documentaries, one of them streaming tonight, try to unpack the McCarthyite Trump-whisperer—progenitor of the postmodern political world we now inhabit
byJ. Hoberman
The Twinned Evils of ‘Nosferatu’
The great film and social document illuminates a primal fear—that of foreign contagion
byJ. Hoberman
Post-Soviet Jewish Punk Art
Zoya Cherkassky’s ‘return to reality’
byJ. Hoberman
‘Joker’ Is the Movie of the Year
The Oscar favorite intelligently addresses America’s current artistic and political twin crises
byJ. Hoberman
The Godfather
How the mafia film came to supplant the Hollywood Western as Oval Office favorite and symbol of American power
byJ. Hoberman
The Marx Brothers in ‘Hello, Dalí’
An unrealized surrealist film project known as ‘Giraffes on Horseback Salad’ is rendered in comix, the latest of a century of Talmudic riffs on the disruptive vaudevillian outsiders
byJ. Hoberman
Alt Right Now
Two new documentaries shed light on the work and thought of Steve Bannon
byJ. Hoberman
The Rootless Cosmopolitan Who Mocked Totalitarian Consciousness
What the late Yugoslav filmmaker Dušan Makavejev contributed to Greenwich Village’s life-affirming anti-authoritarian counterculture
byJ. Hoberman