Film After Film: (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?)

By J. Hoberman

One of the world’s most erudite and entertaining film critics on the state of cinema in the post-digital—and post-9/11—age. This witty and allusive book, in the style of classic film theorists/critics like André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, includes considerations of global cinema’s most important figures and films, from Lars von Trier and Zia Jiangke to WALL-E, Avatar and Inception.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781781680681

J. Hoberman

J. Hoberman's books include The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties; An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War; and the forthcoming Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan (all from The New Press). He has written for Artforum, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books. For over thirty years, he was a film critic for the Village Voice. He lives in New York.

Reviews for Film After Film

[joeydag · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

To be honest I read two of the three parts of this book. I believe the last third is comprised of the actual movie reviews that are edited or reviewed in the first two sections and I never saw one of the films reviewed in that section. The first section of this work is a summary of the film theory that the critic uses and the second section is a collection of his film reviews from the first decade of this millennium. His theory and his reviews are very sociopolitical and quite focused on the Iraq war. I found the reviews where they referred to movies that I had watched were well worth the time to read. The theory as most film theory leaves me in a bemused shock. Film as object or as new social real are to me quite slippery thoughts.

I'm glad to have read the book. The essays remind me that the USA has, as it did in Vietnam, created another world tragedy that the country will have difficulty addressing.

[arewenotben · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Bunch of seemingly cobbled together blog posts and reviews, no real grand point or analysis.