The Village Voice fires their film critic after only 30 years of incompetence.

The Village Voice fires their film critic.

Oh, they are so rash. C'mon, give the guy a chance to learn his job. He's only been at it for about 30 years.

Hobermann seemed to love every experimental and weird work to come along, and it seemed that he never met a pretension he didn't like. In 1998 he chose Alexander Sokurov's Mother and Son, arguably the most pretentious film ever made, as the top film of the year. That film makes Ingmar Bergman seem like a forgotten Farrelly brother.

This sentence from his Wikipedia page just about says it all: "In the 2002 Sight & Sound film poll, Hoberman indicated that Flaming Creatures is his choice for best film ever made."

What? Not Manos, the Hands of Fate?

Here's his classic Top Ten list from 2002:

01. Paris Commune, 1871 (Peter Watkins)
02. The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat) (Zacharias Kunuk)
03. Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov)
04. *Corpus Callosum (Michael Snow)
05. Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes)
06. The Lady and the Duke (Eric Rohmer)
07. Solaris (Steven Soderbergh)
08. What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang)
09. Adaptation. (Spike Jonze)
10. Late Marriage (Dover Koshashvili)


Well, nobody could accuse him of pandering to the public taste! He also once picked The Cable Guy in his annual top ten.

To his credit, his love of weird stuff also extended to some works which deserved more respect than they got from the academy, like Groundhog Day, There's Something About Mary, and Eternal Sunshine.