Email Author Michael Atkinson

1999 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• Kiarostami Takes a Mirror to Movie-World Fame

  published December 28, 1999

  A full decade after its making, Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up emerges from the closed country of Rumored Masterpieces to no doubt pass... More >>

• Setting a Trap

  published December 14, 1999

  E.B. White's tearful prepubescent semi-classic gets the Happy Hollywood treatment, but with disappointing results—Stuart himself is a winsome... More >>

• Doing Time with Glowing Saints and Glowering Sinners

  published December 7, 1999

  When the fiction foundry/movie mine/paradigm spigot that is Stephen King tries for an all-American magical-realism—his fave location for... More >>

• Antonioni Snoozes; Arnold Stretches; Greed is Good Again

  published November 30, 1999

  Part of the price we have to pay, it seems, for the international art-film mardi gras of the '60s and '70s is the discomfiting experience of... More >>

• Where the Boys (and Toys) Are

  published November 23, 1999

  You cannot, apparently, take the Baltimore out of the boy with a lock wrench, and so Barry Levinson returns again, with Liberty Heights, to... More >>

• Pokemon: Mewtwo strikes back

  published November 23, 1999

  Stand aside, for I am the master of Perplexichu, the 152nd Pokémon species of the Head-Slapping variety, with the special power of Gape! In... More >>

• Do the Hokey Poké; Behind-the-Curve Cyberculture

  published November 16, 1999

  Stand aside, for I am the master of Perplexichu, the 152nd Pokémon species of the Head- Slapping variety, with the special power of Gape!... More >>

• Keener Vision

  published October 26, 1999

  The first time most of us witnessed the off-road combustion of Catherine Keener in action was in Tom DiCillo's Johnny Suede (1992),... More >>

• Dead-end kids

  published October 19, 1999

  A scalding, groggy poison-pen portrait of criminal working-class dead-endism, Rowan Woods's The Boys is built to impress—what it... More >>

• Too Close to Home

  published October 12, 1999

  A scalding, groggy poison-pen portrait of criminal working-class dead-endism, Rowan Woods's The Boys is built to impress—what it... More >>

• Sentimental Journeys

  published October 5, 1999

  Mildly more acidic than your average middle - aged tragi - romance, Sydney Pollack's randomly titled Random Hearts almost shoots itself in... More >>

• Martyr Complex

  published September 21, 1999

  Hope. Hope divine, hope springs eternal, Star Wars: A New Hope, Hope Lange, the Hope Diamond, Bob Hope. You can't help it— hope's what... More >>

• Much Too Vulgar a Display of Power

  published September 14, 1999

  For sheer liturgical ookiness, the millennially challenged Catholic bloodletter Stigmata practically breaks a hip trying to outgoose the... More >>

• Domestic Troubles

  published September 7, 1999

  When they work, not merely as genre pieces but dream-stealing windows on our civilized weaknesses and vanities, horror movies can achieve a kind... More >>

• Shelf Life

  published August 31, 1999

  In considering the animated films of Stephen and Timothy Quay, the lion's share of which are now available on one tape from Kino called The... More >>

• Video Dome

  published August 24, 1999

  A true working knowledge of world cinema doesn't happen these days without an acquaintance with Facets Video, the country's largest rental... More >>

• The Last Picture Show

  published August 24, 1999

  Human concoctions that they are, movies have a flaky way of never quite living up to our expectations; whenever we look at what's screening around... More >>

• Vice Versa

  published August 10, 1999

  The paradigmatic auteur maudit, Donald Cammell was always more legendary than praiseworthy. He had all the trappings of a myth: rugged... More >>

• The Uninvited

  published August 3, 1999

  Despite being an inflated, polished-to-an-anonymous-shine Disney deal, M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense has its nervous thumb on... More >>

• Grand Scheme

  published August 3, 1999

  As a matter of mere consumer advice, there is no better movie-for-your-money bargain in the city than the newly restored revival of Jean Renoir's... More >>

• Márta Mészáros

  published July 20, 1999

  Something like the Janis Ian of Eastern Bloc cinema, Hungary's Márta Mészáros has been the only uncompromised feminist voice... More >>

• Rosie

  published July 20, 1999

  Decent films about adolescent girls are hardly a dime a dozen. Watching the new Belgian film Rosie veer alarmingly close to truthfulness... More >>

• Eco Trip

  published June 29, 1999

  In case you haven't heard, the newest critical discipline to be unleashed upon a beleaguered academia is literary ecology, or ecocriticism,... More >>

• The Weasel Goes Pop

  published June 22, 1999

  American male culture fluctuates like a bobbing cocktail stork between being self-satisfied with its progressively earned enlightenment and... More >>

• Return With Honor

  published June 8, 1999

  Now that Spielberg and Benigni have succeeded in dulcifying the Holocaust, here come the Oscar-winning doc-makers of Maya Lin: A Strong... More >>