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Mar 10—Apr 3

J. Hoberman is one of the greatest film critics to emerge from his generation—his writing is adventurous, erudite, and provocative, while simultaneously expressing a boundless pleasure in the art of cinema. To celebrate his 30th year as film critic for The Village Voice, we've asked Hoberman to select films that have sparked some of his most stimulating reviews and articles, as well as a few personal favorites. All text excerpted from reviews by J. Hoberman.

Read J. Hoberman's reviews and articles for each of the films featured in this series here.

Eraserhead (1977) 97min
Mon, Mar 10 at 4:30, 6:50*, 9:30pm
*Introduced by J. Hoberman
Directed by David Lynch
It is the future, I think, which is the setting for Eraserhead, a murky piece of post-nuclear guignol concerning a catatonic young couple who live together in a depressing miasma rendered unbearable by the cries of their hideous mutant offspring. Though its special effects are nauseating, it is far too arty for 42nd Street…not a movie I’d drop acid for, although I would consider it a revolutionary act if someone dropped a reel of it into the middle of Star Wars.

Naked Lunch with Tribulation 99 163min
Tue, Mar 11 at 7pm
Naked Lunch (1991) 115min New Print
Tue, Mar 11 at 7pm
Directed by David Cronenberg
With Peter Weller, Ian Holm, Judy Davis
A deadpan riff, deliberate and decorous...ostentatiously respectful, it’s the accumulation of a hundred small, sustained jokes…a sitcom without canned laughter, something for the malls to ponder. Less an adaptation of Burroughs’ book than a fantasy on how the book came to exist.
Tribulation 99 (1991) 48min
Directed by Craig Baldwin
Avant-garde abstract sensationalism. This masterpiece is at once a sci-fi cheapster, a skewed history of U.S. intervention in Latin America, a satire on conspiratorial thinking, and an essential piece of current Americana.

No Wave Program 1 (1978) 80min
Mon, Mar 17 at 7pm*
*Introduced by James Nares
Rome ’78
Directed by James Nares
The scene’s Grand Hotel—a costume drama that looks like a toga party in Little Lulu’s clubhouse...spindly David McDermott III plays the meglomaniacal Caesar as a sniveling, screaming six-year-old…Lydia Lunch, a black slip hiked over her thighs and a spiky mop of hair cascading onto her face, she rises from her mattress-on-the-floor only once in the film, to chase McDermott around the camera with a whip.

No Wave Program 2 100min
Mon, Mar 17 at 9:15pm
She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978)
Directed by Vivienne Dick
Jaggedly contemplative and unexpectedly funny…a sort of summery no-wave Celine and Julie…Dick has a great feel for scuzz lyricism and skillfully mismatched inserts, cutting away to a row of gutted tenements with a little silver jet flying overhead.
Black Box (1979)
Directed by Beth B. & Scott B
The tight script, clever angles, and well mixed soundtrack encapsulate all the B’s major themes—crime, mind control, sexual repression. Working in the tradition of Orwell, Hitchcock, and Burroughs, the B’s conjure up a parallel sense of seedy, malignant totalitarianism.

The King of Comedy (1983) 109min
Tue, Mar 18 at 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Martin Scorsese
With Robert DeNiro, Jerry Lewis
In France, where Scorsese is an auteur and Lewis a superstar—America personified—their teaming is regarded as a cultural event. As talk show host Jerry Langford, Lewis has given Scorsese his first dramatic performance. Actually, Lewis is not so much De Niro’s co-star as his straight man. Pain and fear – and the convulsive desire for public recognition – are Scorsese’s meat. Not even Woody Allen has chosen to dramatize his neuroses more flagrantly…Racism, misogyny, selfishness, paranoid fury are right up front, however Scorsese offers no apologies.

Ernie Gehr Program 87min
Mon, Mar 24 at 7pm*
*Introduced by Ernie Gehr and J. Hoberman
Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991) 41min
Cinema’s virtuoso minimalist uses a glass-enclosed outdoor elevator as a readymade crane for a series of serial views of San Francisco. The movie is pure sensation…the effect of a slow-motion roller coaster. San Francisco is so viscerally and obsessively transformed that Gehr might have honorably titled his film Vertigo.
Screening with: Shift (1972-74) 9min
and Signal – Germany on the Air (1982-85) 35min

Café Lumière (2003) 103min
Tue, Mar 25 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien
Dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu (and commissioned by Ozu’s old studio, Shochiku, on the occasion of the Japanese master’s centenary), Café Lumière is, in some ways, Hou’s melancholy rumination on the traditional Japanese family that was already in decline a half-century ago, when Ozu made his most celebrated domestic dramas. Back in Tokyo after a stay in Taiwan, Hou’s young protagonist Yoko is subdued and opaque as she reoccupies her microscopic apartment and reestablishes contact with her equally undemonstrative family and friends. The perverse eloquence of Café Lumière lies in the way in which most things remain unsaid. Feelings are largely unexpressed, the better to surface in Yoko’s dreams.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976) 201min
Mon, Mar 31 at 7pm
Directed by Chantal Akerman
The film details a three-day stretch in the life of a compulsively organized, petit bourgeois Belgian widow—a paradigm of efficiency who promptly scours the tub after bathing, finishes very morsel on her plate, doesn’t even need a radio to keep her company, and turns one trick an afternoon to support herself and her teenage son. Despite (and, of course, because of) its rigor, it is a supremely sensual film…the film that changed the face of contemporary European cinema.

Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979) 93min
Tue, Apr 1 at 6:50pm*
*Ticketholders are invited to a party after the screening with free beer!
Directed by Allan Arkush
The film’s dramatic weight, such as it is, is carried by pert P.J. Soles, as the dedicated fan who induces twist-madness among her classmates by blasting ‘Sheena Is A Punk Rocker’ over the P.A. system at Vince Lombardi High…Soles wears satin gym shorts and bounces through the film as though the world was her trampoline.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) 91min
Tue, Apr 1 at 9:15pm*
*Ticketholders are invited to a party preceding the screening with free beer!
Directed by John Carpenter
Transposes the situation of Rio Bravo to Watts: A black police lieutenant, a cool, ultra-Hawksian policewoman and two killers en route to Death Row defend an abandoned precinct house against an onslaught of neighborhood hoodlums that’s as improbably intergrated as a gang out of The Warriors and as implacable and mindlessly malevolent as a squadron of Romero ghouls. Not until the local monsters murder an eight-year-old child—a sequence as shocking as any in Halloween—does Assault become a highly choreographed thrill machine.

Andrei Rublev (1969) 205min
Wed, Apr 2 at 7pm
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
When Andrei Rublev first materialized on the international scene in the late 1960’s, it was an apparent anamoly—a pre-Soviet theater of cruelty charged with resurgent Slavic mysticism. Today, it seems to prophesy the impending storm. Tarkovsky’s epic—and largely invented—biography of Russia’s greatest icon painter, was a superproduction gone ideologically berserk. Violent, even gory, for a Soviet film, Rublev was set against the carnage of the Tatar invasions and took the form of a chronologically discontinuous pageant. Rublev is itself more an icon than a movie about an icon.

A Cloud-Capped Star (1960) 126min
Thu, Apr 3 at 6:50, 9:30pm
Directed by Ritwik Ghatak
With Supriya Choudhury
The protagonists are a refugee family living on the outskirts of Calcutta…as ‘the only earning member’ Nita initially embraces her fate with a kind of voluptuous self-abnegation. She even contributes to the support of an erstwhile suitor. (The title comes from a compliment he pays her, and it is fully justified by Supriya Choudhury’s luminous performance. The film rise and falls on her private, inward smile, sudden turns towards or away from the camera.) As formally exciting as it is emotionally absorbing…the summit of Ghatak’s art.