Email Author Michael Atkinson

2003 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• Checkpoint Bride: My Big Fat Occupied Territories Wedding

  published August 19, 2003

  Unlike, say, the Yiddish cinema of yore and Tony Gatlif's Romany jags, Palestinian films are nationless without being borderless—they... More >>

• S.Q.U.A.T.

  published August 12, 2003

  No one will ever know what possessed Columbia to remake the original S.W.A.T. TV series—a dreary network cop show that lasted a mere... More >>

• Braving the Elephants

  published August 12, 2003

  No question, debut author John Haskell is not Jackson Pollock, nor is his book of stories, I Am Not Jackson Pollock, a book of stories, or... More >>

• Film

  published August 12, 2003

  Renaissance man Matthew Barney is such a busy artistic powerhouse these days (Cremaster 3's climactic movement, "The Order," is out this... More >>

• Time and Tide

  published August 5, 2003

  August, and finally a real summer movie: Julie Lopes-Curval's simple, wise, pitch-perfect Seaside, a tapestry film comprised of... More >>

• It's All Over Now

  published July 29, 2003

  A mad monster party, a stoner's dystopian doodle, an album-climaxing mega-dirge visualized as open-bar Hollywood dinner party—how to describe... More >>

• Ways of Seeing

  published July 22, 2003

  What with the current release of Madame Satã and the breakout succès d'estime of City of God, it's tough to ignore... More >>

• Epic Proportions

  published July 15, 2003

  One hundred and ten or so years into the deluge, we may choose to take our movies as mere collective daydreams or as infinitely manifold... More >>

• Whiskey and Wry

  published July 8, 2003

  Aki Kaurismäki—Finnish auteur, deadpan provocateur, renowned boozician, last of the red-hot existential modernists—has seen his... More >>

• Time to Get Ill

  published June 24, 2003

  To every creatively frozen, summer-movie ice age comes a little heat lightning, and these gray dog days it's Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later.... More >>

• The Broom of the System

  published June 24, 2003

  Don't buy it! It fellates! No, actually there's nothing at all wrong with the new, better-tasting, sold-by-weight-not-volume fifth... More >>

• Beasts of Burden

  published June 17, 2003

  It's not so easy being green—that much we know. Striving with science-nerd earnestness to be more than merely a summer box-office... More >>

• Assassination Tangos

  published June 10, 2003

  An inexplicable pageant of extraterrestrial coolness, Pistol Opera is pulp artiste Seijun Suzuki's first film to see a U.S. release in more... More >>

• False Grooves

  published June 3, 2003

  The trend of remodeling finger-snapping 1960s heist flicks—draining them of grooviness and tricking them out with fantasy-tech... More >>

• All in the Family

  published May 27, 2003

  Choose life, as Irvine Welsh used to say. As the muleshit of modern moviedom deepens, our sympathies naturally swivel toward the "real." The new... More >>

• Too Sprung to Die

  published May 13, 2003

  The vast majority of imported Asian films are unambiguously feel-good, middle-class, semi-Westernized Miramaximations, while an occasional few are... More >>

• Micro Cosmos

  published May 6, 2003

  The first gout of individualized cinema from yet another fledgling, post-bloc nation, the Slovenian flicks at BAM share a breath-down-the-neck... More >>

• Into The Outlands

  published April 29, 2003

  For even the rangiest moviegoers, the notion that the newly emerged, ex-Soviet states nestled between China, Russia and the Caspian Sea—the... More >>

• Lonely Planet

  published April 22, 2003

  Matt Dillon's obligatory shot at life-rafting his career with a sullen, self-directed quasi-indie, City of Ghosts radiates an old-fashioned... More >>

• Taking Wing

  published April 15, 2003

  Once upon a time, in a decidedly pre-Dogmatic age, Lars von Trier was an electrifying image-smith, and so it is that the 1987 version of... More >>

• The Finnish Line

  published April 8, 2003

  The consummate people's drunkard-poet and architect of cosmic blue-collar doldrums, Aki Kaurismäki is also the most sanguine demigod in... More >>

• Beyond The Valley

  published April 8, 2003

  Something of an international-cinema manticore—French head, German body, Euro-hobo tail—Swiss film culture has never projected a... More >>

• Devaluing the Euro

  published April 1, 2003

  The Good Thief, Neil Jordan's remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur (1955), doesn't quite freedom-fry the Gallic classic,... More >>

• The Exile Files

  published March 25, 2003

  Ubiquitous, menacing-avuncular character-icon Robert Duvall has directed only four films in 28 years, but all evidence a sensibility virtually... More >>

• Man's Pest Friend

  published March 18, 2003

  One might idly think of the 1970s as a more hospitable era for movies about homicidal rats, but here we have Willard, a devilish, high-time... More >>