Email Author Michael Atkinson

2004 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• Film

  published April 6, 2004

  Salvatore Giuliano Criterion Finally available for the everyday cineaste, Francesco Rosi's seminal career-starter ignited... More >>

• Ashes and Diamonds

  published April 6, 2004

  In retrospect, cinema under Euro-Communism turned out to have a significant upside—artists were restricted and potentially censured, but they... More >>

• Trade Deficit

  published March 30, 2004

  Let's take this moment to recognize an official movie genre, the Miramaxical, more or less defined as heavy-handed imports that could just as... More >>

• Celestial Seasons

  published March 23, 2004

  Is there such a thing as a Buddhist film, and if there were, could you watch it without tumbling into a stupor? For all of cinema's meditative... More >>

• No Longer Enfant, Still Terrible

  published March 9, 2004

  If Lars von Trier didn't exist, would we be able to invent him? Movie-culture malcontent, formal nose-thumber, pro-am Dogmatist, petulant artiste,... More >>

• Answers to the World's Hardest Movie Quiz

  published March 9, 2004

  "Many men are stored full of unused knowledge," once wrote Henry Ward Beecher. "Like loaded guns that are never fired off, they are stuffed with... More >>

• Film

  published March 2, 2004

  The 900-pound gorilla of new wave-age DVD-box events, this eight-disc set starts with the Polish maestro's astonishing one-two pulverizing... More >>

• Mamet conjures a worst-case scenario for the Bush twins

  published March 2, 2004

  With Spartan, David Mamet takes on the digi-tech, hard-Clancy-core intel thriller most often inflated by Tony Scott and like-minded... More >>

• It's a Small World After All

  published February 24, 2004

  Spring finally arrives, the single remaining movie season not yet converted into a massive marketing skullfuck. Rather, the February-April spread... More >>

• Frighty Blighty: Mad dogs, razor blades, and Englishmen

  published February 24, 2004

  Given the historical context and literary roots, it's a wonder that the British film industry's post-war exploration of Gothic chaos hasn't... More >>

• Film

  published February 10, 2004

  Having idled in Eurofest-land for four years, Jerzy Stuhr's The Big Animal is finally being hoisted here on the virtue of its Kieslowski... More >>

• Teenage Nightmare

  published February 10, 2004

  Two new films, African in their sympathies and traumatized materials if not necessarily in production fact, both glance off the state of life in... More >>

• Belvaux's Trilogy: Intricately woven but separately worn

  published February 3, 2004

  To recap: Lucas Belvaux's precocious trifecta is an adventure in simultaneity rather than progression; the three films can be viewed in any order... More >>

• Sweet Home Taliban

  published January 27, 2004

  The first all-Afghan feature to be made since the rise of the Taliban in 1996, Siddiq Barmak's Osama could hardly be called a reactively... More >>

• Freaks and Geeks

  published January 27, 2004

  A pointillist master of middle-American disaffection, second-shoe-dropping comic rhythm, pop-cult radiation, and the deceivingly unsimple art of... More >>

• World's Hardest Movie Quiz 2004

  published January 20, 2004

  Here, once again, the semi-annual Stuart Byron Movie Trivia Quiz attempts to confound the world's cine-trivia cabalists, who today have 3 billion... More >>

• Triple Thread

  published January 20, 2004

  Shot all at once, interwoven like a Persian gabbeh, and released here in an unprecedented three-week sequence, the triple feature that... More >>

• Native Son

  published January 6, 2004

  It's been a quarter-century or so since Australian movies began, with The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, to seriously contemplate the scorched... More >>