Email Author Michael Atkinson

2012 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• American Animal

  published May 16, 2012

  Bizarre, off-putting, and finally demanding of rubberneck respect, this fish-tank indie never leaves a rather lovely duplex apartment, occupied... More >>

• Deeper Into the Abyss: On Death Row with Werner Herzog

  published April 25, 2012

  Unlikely as it might have seemed 25 years ago, when his documentary jones took off but his "career" was idling in neutral, Werner Herzog has... More >>

• Headhunters

  published April 25, 2012

  Arguably the strangest of the many recent Scandinavian movies to rifle through modern American-indie tropes and then cash in by getting bought... More >>

• Late Bloomers

  published April 11, 2012

  A life-crisis farce custom-built exclusively for self-absorbed menopausal women, Julie Gavras's film wants nothing more than to have coffee and... More >>

• Womb

  published March 28, 2012

  Otherwise known as "That Crazy Cloning Incest Movie," Hungarian indie Benedek Fliegauf's attention-getter Womb begins with a childhood... More >>

• Brake

  published March 21, 2012

  All right, now it's no longer just a stunt; it's a subgenre—the Lone-Actor-Trapped-in-a-Confined-Space Thriller. Squeezing into the... More >>

• The Decoy Bride

  published March 7, 2012

  Pernicious tripe suitable only for masochists and the intellectually disabled, Sheree Folkson's rom-com tracks the shenanigans endured by a... More >>

• The Intimate Details of Japanese Life in "Extreme Private Ethos"

  published March 7, 2012

  This palm-sized program of six films has a narrow focus: Japanese docs obsessing, for good or ill, on the emotional undulations of modern... More >>

• Undefeated

  published February 15, 2012

  An inspirational sports tearjerker in distilled form, this new Harvey-hawked doc lands in North Memphis, where the underfunded, all-black... More >>

• In Darkness: Down in the Sewer, Desperate to Survive

  published February 8, 2012

  Holocaust culture has proved to be essentially infinite—almost 70 years since the end of World War II, and untold stories of decimation... More >>

• Splinters

  published February 1, 2012

  Apparently, in the '80s, some fly-by-night pilot left a surfboard behind on the beach in a small Papuan village, and, this being the unpaved,... More >>

• Still Hell in West Memphis: No Happy Endings in Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory

  published January 11, 2012

  The only films to help rescue warm bodies from death row besides Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line, the Paradise Lost franchise... More >>