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“Perceptive, lively, and packed with verbal fireworks.” —The Independent
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 Jia Zhangke to WALL-E, Avatar and Inception.
Spirited, thought-provoking and popping with fresh perspectives.
[Film After Film] does what Hoberman does best: use movies and movie culture as prism for understanding political events—and vice versa.
Crisply written ... offers many interesting insights ... it will afford knowledgeable general readers and film buffs much to savor.
Hoberman is tremendously insightful as he integrates his concerns with cinema’s political, historical, and aesthetic past and his visions of its future. For cinephiles of any stripe, it’s a rare book. He soundly articulates the ideological transformations, digital facelifts, and aesthetic insurrections that have tugged at cinema since the turn of the millennium—ones that have made the medium seem simultaneously stagnant and livelier than ever.
A brilliant, patchwork statement about the future of the cinema—spoiler alert: there is a future—in the face of reports of its imminent demise ... Hoberman’s book is a broadly accessible errand in the articulation of how we might imagine digital cinema to reflect twenty-first century culture.
Always a witty and engaging writer, Hoberman has one of the most recognizable voices in contemporary film writing.
Put simply, nobody writes about the connection between movies and culture better than Hoberman, and Film After Film is a reminder of that fact.
Elegiac and anxious, critical and poetic, Film After Film surveys the current seismic shifts in movies and considers their effect on the cinematic imagination ... [Hoberman’s] prose shines without qualification, and the selections remind us that his tenure at the Voice was, simply put, one of the greatest ever by an American film critic, influencing as it did an entire generation of writers.
Hoberman wittily traces the interlocking of political reality and moviemaking fantasies, to often disturbing effect.
Nobody in America writes as well about culture and film as J. Hoberman.
Film After Film is both a concise history book and one of the best viewing guides available.
One could go so far as to say that these days Hoberman’s a thinker akin to Bazin in his influence.
One could go so far as to say that these days Hoberman’s a thinker akin to Bazin in his influence, through his frequent reviews, books, and as an occasional guest curator.
A dense, fascinating assemblage that ... encapsulates a decade of film and politics ... by turns jocular and brilliantly reflective.
Cogent and compelling