Email Author Michael Atkinson

2004 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• Bringing Out the Dead: Scorsese's Sordid Everyman Returns

  published December 28, 2004

  What can be newly said about this savage, many-headed dragon of the American new wave, a luridly realistic movie about a quiet New York psychopath... More >>

• Looking For Richard

  published December 21, 2004

  A blip on the harried cultural radar of 1974—when Watergate, hemorrhaging 'Nam fallout, European upheavals, and endless Cold War negotiations... More >>

• Soft Skin: Freudian Lust and Costumed Silliness in Demy's May Day Musical

  published December 14, 2004

  With only a rough third of his singsong filmography familiar to American movieheads, French new wave fantasist Jacques Demy seems long overdue for... More >>

• The Fable Guy

  published December 14, 2004

  A wry Charles Addams channeling arisen to challenge the childrens'-section dominance of J.K. Rowling, the Lemony Snicket narratives are sourball... More >>

• Cheadle survives a timid account of the Rwandan genocide

  published December 14, 2004

  Credit where credit's due: Terry George's atrocity-docudrama Hotel Rwanda addresses that nation's 1994 firestorm of civilian massacre... More >>

• The Life Aeronautic

  published December 7, 2004

  There's no overestimating the contributions Martin Scorsese has made to American cinephilia. More than just a moviemaker, he has been a restless,... More >>

• Aging Bull

  published December 7, 2004

  Whatever French film critics may say, Clint Eastwood is no pure-hearted artiste—his favored working regimen consists of a thick, undressed... More >>

• Film

  published December 7, 2004

  The latest and most luxurious launch of K-horror to both hit U.S. screens and get immediately bought up for remake purposes, Kim Ji-woon's moody... More >>

• Film

  published December 7, 2004

  Tom Kalin's 1992 low-rent, smooth-as-silk re-upholstering of the infamous flapper-age Leopold and Loeb murder case is aptly titled: It's as much... More >>

• Film

  published December 7, 2004

  A dedicated voyeur at the human zoo, Dog Days auteur Ulrich Seidl was first a documentarian, and here's his 1995 keynote film, a... More >>

• Film

  published December 7, 2004

  The DVD-ization of Carl Theodor Dreyer continues apace with the release of this forgotten 1924 German Expressionist treasure, as antiquated by... More >>

• Film

  published November 30, 2004

  Once upon a time, there was a little film that sundered virtually every classic Old World taboo, against sexual lust, fetishism, sadism,... More >>

• That Sinking Feeling

  published November 30, 2004

  A helium-tickled beach ball of a movie that struggles to stay inflated, Wes Anderson's lumberingly titled new film is all absurd-ironic concept:... More >>

• Life on a String in Takeshi Kitano's Sentimental Triptych

  published November 30, 2004

  The cognitive disconnect in regard to—and perhaps at the deliberate hands of—Takeshi Kitano grows inexorably wider with Dolls,... More >>

• Film

  published November 30, 2004

  This placid 1954 Brit cartoonization of Orwell was revealed in 1999 to have been covertly funded, produced, and de-Orwellized by the E. Howard... More >>

• Flight Club

  published November 23, 2004

  The Hong Kong movie matrix has reached a state of deracinated gloss, homogenized out from speed-mad native pop lunacy to postcard-bourgeois... More >>

• Natural Born Killer

  published November 16, 2004

  There seems to be no dodging the big, fat neo-epic, a born-again genre with roots in the expensive deployment of muscular-dull movie stars,... More >>

• Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

  published November 9, 2004

  Once something of a reckless, diabolically comic voice, Pedro Almodóvar has since entered middle age asking fairly standard questions about... More >>

• Slippery When Wet

  published November 2, 2004

  Beloved internationally as a classy pulp-meister, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been, I think, largely misread—it may be more accurate and... More >>

• A Korean New Wave Copes With the Burden of History

  published November 2, 2004

  Managing to collect a slew of vital Korean films that have not already been aired in local festivals, the Walter Reade series steers clear, for... More >>

• Film

  published October 26, 2004

  Completist Dreyerians cannot live by Criterion discs alone—Image does DVD justice to cine-history with the restored release of this 1920... More >>

• Film

  published October 26, 2004

  Fair representation of current Czech-ness or not, this brief series has a few oddities sprinkled amid the middlebrow has-beens (Oscar nominee... More >>

• Cheap, Raw Kitschfests of Yesteryear Spearhead Halloween Retro

  published October 19, 2004

  Scary? The season's preeminent all-hallow'd series returns with another cache of obscure, semi-forgotten, and all-too-familiar genre... More >>

• It's a Shame About Ray

  published October 19, 2004

  For 20 years or more America's most beloved blues wailer as well as its most thoroughly forgiven celebrity junkie, Ray Charles is a Hollywood... More >>

• Film

  published October 19, 2004

  Swedish absurdist Roy Andersson's mortifying sensibility, found in almost crystalline form in Songs From the Second Floor (2000), can leave... More >>