Email Author Michael Atkinson

2001 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• The Sorrow and the P. Diddy

  published December 25, 2001

  As headlong wallows in hatred and degradation go, Marc Forster's Monster's Ball self-consciously outgrunges the year in American film, but... More >>

• Space Odyssey

  published December 18, 2001

  Of A-list journeymen directors, Michael Mann is a unique specimen with a disarming record of electrifying perfectly mundane material—whatever... More >>

• The Tall B

  published December 11, 2001

  The last of the red-hot, golden-age Hollywood genre buckaroos, Budd Boetticher, who died November 29 at the age of 85, represented a long-vanished... More >>

• Icon See Clearly Now

  published December 11, 2001

  There comes a moment in every massively popular movie star's trajectory when his or her movies become expositions on the fermented psychology of... More >>

• Time Bomb

  published December 4, 2001

  War culture has become blithely easy to deride in eras of conflict as well as peacetime, but surely documentarian Hartmut Bitomsky's new film,... More >>

• Moviehead Gift Guide

  published November 27, 2001

  With the plexes pipe-glutted with elfin this and magical that, the only sensible recourse is to prime the economy by shopping for real... More >>

• Heaven and Hell

  published November 27, 2001

  Entranced, romantic, utopian, and utterly French, Jacques Demy has always been the most patronized and underappreciated of the major nouvelle... More >>

• The Reckless Moments

  published November 20, 2001

  Already, so many of the late-century world cinema promises have been broken: The Chinese Fifth Generation has devolved into efficient, softhearted... More >>

• All in the Stars

  published November 13, 2001

  A distinctive and restless force in European cinema for more than 35 years, the Taviani brothers mastered an eloquent stylistic bridge between... More >>

• Lost in the House of Games

  published November 6, 2001

  A seminal vernacular demiurge in his stagecraft, David Mamet has tended toward a sort of hard-boiled mushiness in his films. Oleanna is an... More >>

• Where the Mild Things Are

  published October 30, 2001

  Adept smugglers of neurotic subtexts, children's narratives can be notoriously subversive (as Alison Lurie's Don't Tell the Grown-Ups... More >>

• Houses of the Unholy

  published October 23, 2001

  Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter is the movie freak's definitive love machine: maligned when first released in 1955, hopelessly... More >>

• Metaphysician, Heal Thyself

  published October 23, 2001

  The restless, gabby intelligence behind Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, and this season's left-field double... More >>

• Another City, Not My Own

  published October 16, 2001

  Whatever else can be said regarding the crossed vectors of September 11 and the legacy of mass entertainment, one thing's certain: We have joined... More >>

• Far From the Maddin Crowd

  published October 9, 2001

  If meta-folk-rock idiosyncrat/renaissance artificer Cory McAbee has anything to say about it, irony is not dead—it's merely lost in the... More >>

• Children’s Crusades

  published October 2, 2001

  Movies have had a difficult time justifying their own existence, never mind their own publicity, these past weeks, but here may be what the... More >>

• Eat Drink Man Mariah

  published September 25, 2001

  Beginning with a Broadway Danny Rose roundtable chin session and climaxing with a seizure of unlikely but cathartic wiseguy retribution,... More >>

• Tried and True

  published September 25, 2001

  The winner of this year's film quiz is Braden Goetz, of Washington, D.C., who works in the U.S. Department of Education. As per Goetz's request,... More >>

• As the Lights Go Down

  published September 11, 2001

  The hot-pants Queen Victoria of American film criticism, Pauline Kael has now paid the debt of nature, providing the obituarians with the... More >>

• What's Eating You

  published September 4, 2001

  Straight-faced and blithely ironic, Bernard Rapp's A Matter of Taste is a tale of obsessive love, but here it's a deranged, Nietzschean... More >>

• Screen Test

  published August 28, 2001

  As is the tradition, this year's annual Stuart Byron Movie Trivia Quiz seeks to winnow out dilettantes from the dead-serious cinephiles, and... More >>

• Market Driven

  published August 28, 2001

  More than just a pulp-for-pulp's-sake statement, Ghosts of Mars poses a battery of questions: How does John Carpenter get his new movies... More >>

• Chronic Fatigue

  published August 21, 2001

  Movie-watching has always demanded a tolerance for solipsism, but even fans of Kevin Smith may allow that the freedom Clerks won him (to... More >>

• Anna Karina’s Magnificent Movieness

  published August 14, 2001

  The sad-eyed, raven-haired Guinevere of the international art film's belle epoque, Anna Karina will always possess a hallowed place in movie... More >>

• Blood Feuds

  published August 14, 2001

  To watch Korean movies is to watch a national culture bar-brawl with itself, and fight dirty every step of the way. There may not be a more... More >>