Email Author Michael Atkinson

2003 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• Rocket the Casbah

  published December 30, 2003

  This past August, as both Iraqi and "coalition" cadavers piled up in post-"victory" insurgency fighting, the Pentagon's Special Operations and... More >>

• Theory of Flight

  published December 23, 2003

  Uniquely jacked into a ripe sense of antique-nursery Victoriana and buzzing with a pre-adolescent metaphoric charge, J.M. Barrie's Peter... More >>

• Tough Guys Shouldn't Dance: Altman Ballet Sprains Ankle

  published December 23, 2003

  Looking ahead to his 79th birthday, Robert Altman has been plugging away on movie sets, manufacturing adroit classics, odious train wrecks,... More >>

• Yesterday's Tomorrows: Futures From Sci-Fi's Past 35 Years

  published December 23, 2003

  Of course, we all know that science fiction—or speculative fiction, as in, fiction-of-what's-coming—is actually about the here-and-now,... More >>

• Tracking Shot

  published December 9, 2003

  Written by The Pianist's Ronald Harwood, from a novel by the late, great Brian Moore, The Statement comes with a hoity-toity... More >>

• Connect the Dolts

  published December 9, 2003

  Is there a name for what the Farrelly brothers do? Poker-faced genre pastiche, Helen Keller-joke snottiness, absurdist sentimentality, whatever:... More >>

• As Bad As It Gets: What Women Want Panderer Helps The Aged

  published December 9, 2003

  Few contemporary names send more of a succubine chill down the discerning filmgoer's spine than Nancy Meyers (What Women Want, Father of... More >>

• The Trip to Dreadful: Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Grubstakers

  published December 2, 2003

  A living demonstration of Sundance priorities, the ultra-indie Special Jury Prize winner What Alice Found has a shaky grip on interesting... More >>

• His Life as a Fake: Small-Town Cop's Downtime at the Academy

  published November 25, 2003

  If South American cinema is indeed enjoying a renaissance, it may owe everything, ironically, to the continent's economic convulsions, which... More >>

• Ride With the Devil

  published November 25, 2003

  The western is dead, long live the western. No longer a meaningful staple in our culture, this most iconic and supremely Kantian genre persists in... More >>

• The Parent Traps

  published November 18, 2003

  The embrace and snarl of parent-child love-hate is one of humanity's deathless issues, and true to his record, Canadian auteur Denys Arcand... More >>

• Life as a House: Grown-Up Drama Dances About Architecture

  published November 11, 2003

  Decidedly unsensational and appealingly grown-up, Chuck Workman's autumnal character study may be the most sagacious cinematic dancing ever done... More >>

• Chips Off the Old Bloc

  published November 4, 2003

  Established one year before United Artists was incorporated on the opposite side of the globe, and before the other Hollywood studios coalesced... More >>

• Odd Couplings: Brit Stars Flounder in Singleton Dysfunction

  published November 4, 2003

  No critic likes kicking lapdogs (though many semi-secretly enjoy, as I do, punting the occasional Rhodesian Ridgeback), and Richard Curtis's... More >>

• Lone Star State of Mind

  published October 21, 2003

  Like so many fondly remembered DIY frightmares of the 'Nam era, Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) harbored a rich nougat... More >>

• The Martyr They Come

  published October 14, 2003

  Veronica Guerin, the crusading Irish journalist played with a relentlessly playful squint by Cate Blanchett, is murdered just minutes into her own... More >>

• Enemies, a Love Story

  published October 7, 2003

  The issue, for me, has never been the basic nature of la méthode Coenist, an arch, slapstick genre gumbo-boil into which anything... More >>

• Bum and Coke

  published September 30, 2003

  The slimmest interface with the fringes of the American pornopolis is what justifies the docudrama existence of Wonderland, a... More >>

• The Young and the Damned

  published September 23, 2003

  The post-teen rom-com is a desperate business in woeful need of intelligent resources, but after beholding Woody Allen's Anything Else and... More >>

• Children's Hour

  published September 16, 2003

  The invention of childhood has been with us since the Victorians, but as the night-day contrast between Nicolas Philibert's nonfiction To Be... More >>

• Leni Riefenstahl, 1902-2003

  published September 16, 2003

  Once upon a time in Berlin, there was a young, blonde, beautiful maiden named Leni, who starred in silent movies and longed to make films herself.... More >>

• Back To Nature

  published September 9, 2003

  Both cries from the all-American wilderness, Robb Moss's The Same River Twice and Eli Roth's Cabin Fever comprise a veritable... More >>

• Tarantino-Tested

  published September 9, 2003

  For better or worse, the entirety of our mass culture has taken one of the most iconic images from Citizen Kane—in which the aging,... More >>

• Trouble Every Day

  published September 2, 2003

  Sophisticated, coolly imaginative, and genre-carefree, Delphine Gleize's debut feature Carnage has the organic shape and elliptical flux of... More >>

• Rookie's Fortune

  published August 26, 2003

  Given the inherently debased modus operandi of the film industry in this country—has there ever been a system of aesthetic production so... More >>