Email Author Michael Atkinson

2004 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• It Takes Evangelicals, Reruns, and Pot to Make a Village

  published July 27, 2004

  Is the "secret" of M. Night Shyamalan's mythic O. Henry saga The Village out yet? You'll hear a large, rattling groan of film-geek... More >>

• Mann on Fire

  published July 27, 2004

  The new Michael Mann movie Collateral began as a tagline so catchy it came with lint attached: A cold-blooded assassin-for-hire (Tom... More >>

• System Failure

  published July 13, 2004

  Seriously, do you need film reviews to tell you what you already know? That the new studio meatloaf I, Robot—"suggested by" Isaac... More >>

• Sweet Smell of Excess: Fellini's Ethical Society Reporting

  published July 13, 2004

  Fellini may be the most dated and retrospectively overinflated of the new wave era's headline acts, but La Dolce Vita (1960) is still a... More >>

• I Was Bourne, But . . .

  published July 13, 2004

  Although it didn't seem obvious at the time of its release, The Bourne Identity (2002) is a quietly remarkable piece of studio-movie... More >>

• To the Bitter End

  published June 29, 2004

  Maurice Pialat, who died last year at age 77, was a Euro-film conundrum—hailed yet reviled, widely distributed yet rarely appreciated,... More >>

• Boogie Knights

  published June 29, 2004

  Another ornery boar leaping atop the new millennium's pig-pile of demi-historical and/or magick-stuffed battle sagas, King Arthur is, on... More >>

• Much Ozu About Everything: An Essential Retro's Encore Run

  published June 22, 2004

  Whatever bogus fireworks might be occupying the entertainment-industry airspace above our heads, it's always news when Ozu comes to town. One of... More >>

• Anarchy in the E.U.

  published June 15, 2004

  An inspired and uncompromised experiment in apocalyptic anxiety, Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf is conceived as a headlong rush into the... More >>

• Daze of Being Wild

  published June 8, 2004

  In this year's edition of the city's favorite volcanic pulp-film festival, the bar for pure Asian movieness seems to be both higher and lower than... More >>

• You'll Sleep Through the Film: Reheated Get Carter More Lukewarm Than Cool

  published June 8, 2004

  With his sensibility still vinyl-skipping somewhere in 1965, Brit would-be auteur Mike Hodges seems an unlikely candidate for re-emergence, and... More >>

• Das Bootlegs

  published June 1, 2004

  Sad as it seems, the cinema devout must wait for fickle businessmen to acquire rights, manufacture copies, and release videos in order to get our... More >>

• Deadpan Walking

  published June 1, 2004

  Indie films have an obvious edge over studio projects: They are free to be the best roadside chili dog in Monterey rather than another... More >>

• Dirty Harry

  published May 25, 2004

  Whatever else it may be, the Harry Potter edda is surely the most popular narrative about the dawning of pubertal awareness ever created, and in... More >>

• The Freethinker: A Protean Rebel Returns to the Present Tense

  published May 25, 2004

  No cinephiles, if asked to enumerate the world's greatest living filmmakers from their front-brains, would think to conjure up the... More >>

• Beyond Belief

  published May 18, 2004

  Nothing howls out for a good, steel-tipped satiric whipping like modern American evangelism—the public discourse is so poisoned with cant... More >>

• Greenbacks

  published May 11, 2004

  For most intents and purposes, sequels should be considered a genre all their own. They are not, generally, "about" anything but their precursory... More >>

• After the Rehearsals: Bergman's 1982 Career Summation

  published May 11, 2004

  Of the Art Film-era über-auteurs, Fellini, Antonioni, Godard, Truffaut, Kurosawa, and Buñuel remain potent currency in one form or... More >>

• They Build Horses, Don't They?

  published May 4, 2004

  How did we get here? An Oscar for Gladiator, a few Brad ab crunches, and suddenly it's 1957 again, when the classics (or, at least,... More >>

• Secondhand Smoke: Spilling the Beans in 11 Chatty Skits

  published May 4, 2004

  Historically, you could do worse than think of Jim Jarmusch as the Dylan among America's current generation of spitballing-structuralist indie... More >>

• Love Actually

  published April 27, 2004

  Lee Chang-dong's Oasis is, at first blush, one of those occasional miracles that approach leapingly scandalous material with a superhuman... More >>

• Life and Nothing But

  published April 20, 2004

  Stress-cracked mother-daughter symbiosis gets a thorough microscoping in first-timer Julie Bertuccelli's Since Otar Left . . . , a... More >>

• A Classic Movie Metaphor Returns for Another Showdown

  published April 20, 2004

  Designed from the flowchart up to be a kind of monolithic American metaphor, Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952)—restored and rereleased... More >>

• Codes Unknown

  published April 13, 2004

  Destined to be overlooked and underappreciated, Yoji Yamada's The Twilight Samurai is a mature, revisionist, Budd Boetticher samurai epic.... More >>

• Rediscovered '60s Death-Row Doc Walks the Thin Blue Line

  published April 13, 2004

  You may not be able to accurately tag William Friedkin's The People vs. Paul Crump (1962) a forgotten film—in most senses, it has... More >>