Across the Movi-verse: Writing on Film, 2011–2021, a new collection of essays by Adjunct Professor of Film and Film alum J. Hoberman '81, was published by Film Desk Books on August 25. The anthology gathers previously uncollected essays, tributes, reviews, and reflections from the period preceding his tenure as the film critic at The Village Voice. The Movi-verse contains essays on the Spaghetti Western, the films of the Obama era, the French notion of the film maudit, or cursed film, the U.S. distribution of the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and the film Triumph of the Will, as well as writings on the films of Chantal Akerman, Mike Kuchar, Jean Rouch, Steve McQueen, Sergei Loznitsa, and Todd Phillips. The compendium includes specific essays like “Pop Before Pop: Welles, Sirk, and Hitchcock,” “My Debt to Jonas Mekas,” and “Why I Cannot Review Jonas Mekas's Conversations with Filmmakers.” The assembled pieces examine Hoberman’s conflicted feelings about singular figures in cinema history, as well as the editor who published his first pieces for the Voice, told without the burden of a weekly gig as a journalist.
Hoberman’s other published books include Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings; Underground Movies, Radical Pop, published by Verso Books in 2025; Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, published by The New Press in 2019; and An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, published by The New Press in 2011. In addition to his books, Hoberman publishes frequently in Artforum, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. Of his writing Ted Loos of The New York Times says Hoberman is “one of the few film writers whose work has no expiration date.” Adam Nayman of Cineaste calls Hoberman “the preeminent stream-of-social-consciousness film scholar of the past thirty years.”
In celebration of Across the Movi-verse, Hoberman will introduce Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom at the Museum of The Moving Image on October 11, 2026, where he will sign books as well.
Purchase Across the Movi-verse here.
