J. Hoberman

A Separation is an urgently shot courtroom drama designed to put you in the jury box. Dispensing with preliminaries, it opens at a judicial hearing where, both facing the camera that stands in for the judge, a quarrelsome husband and wife each make their case. Both are middle-class members of...

A Dangerous Method is something of an understatement. As cataclysmic as it is, this historically scrupulous science-fiction romance concerning the discovery of the unconscious mind might have been titled War of the Worlds or The Beast From 5000 Fathoms. The film is at once a lucid movie of ideas, a...

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is predicated on a pair of enigmatic personalities: a colorless bureaucratic master spook, George Smiley; and a double agent the Soviets have planted near the top of British intelligence whom Smiley must unmask. Although not without violence, the story is essentially a procedural in which, playing...

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a svelte remake of the 2009 Swedish blockbuster, a movie that opens with a bit of Led Zeppelin grandiosity (covered by Karen O) and a credit sequence of scary satanic rubber-fetish ickiness. Set in a freeze-your-blood land of streamlined chrome, steely dawns, and...

War Horse finds the silver lining of individual salvation in one of modern history's darkest thunderclouds: World War I. As the English lad Albert (Jeremy Irvine) bonds with the beloved, half-thoroughbred steed he has named Joey and, once the horse is conscripted by the British army, follows him onto Flanders...