Email Author Michael Atkinson

2005 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• Gangs of Winnipeg: Shapeless Canadian Indie Strikes Out

  published December 27, 2005

  Referring not to the old Burt Reynolds show nor the armored fighting vehicle so deck in Iraq, the title of Canadian indie Noam Gonick's film... More >>

• Cinematic Dread: Doc Captures Cannibals

  published December 27, 2005

  When are movies not art or entertainment, but something else entirely—an atrocity exhibition, or rubbernecking masochism? All manner of... More >>

• Serve and Folly

  published December 20, 2005

  What we think about when we think about Woody Allen: the Woody of the 1970s, parodic nebbish-genius turned self-satiric nebbish-romantic, whose... More >>

• Frank, Black: Film Noir's Hard-Boiled Cool as All-American Art

  published December 20, 2005

  Noir and away: Somewhere in the annals of America's coolest and most beloved mega-genre arises this 1946 sweatbox, in which amnesiac WWII vet John... More >>

• Brosnan's Boozy Assassin Proves Tomorrow Never Dies, But Fades

  published December 20, 2005

  Playing a near-sociopathic deadeye dick in Richard Shepard's new dependie, The Matador, Pierce Brosnan is a creepy wonder—the Bondian... More >>

• Camera Obscure

  published December 13, 2005

  Cool and simple but resonating invisibly out into our lives like an X-ray, Michael Haneke's Caché (Hidden) is a mystery wrapped in a... More >>

• Up a Creek, no Paddle: Chainsaw Ripoff Full of Cruel Claptrap

  published December 13, 2005

  Updating the archetypal white-explorers-visiting- savage-jungle scenario and using it to express doubts about the success of modern civil society... More >>

• Code Unknown

  published December 13, 2005

  Especially if you consider the possibility that Caché's final shot could be another of the film's occult surveillances, what's at... More >>

• 'Aeon Flux'

  published December 6, 2005

  Hardly a stunnah: The pre-Matrix MTV-anime phenom known as Aeon Flux (by animator Peter Chung) converts to a cretinous... More >>

• Six Feet Under

  published December 6, 2005

  Clearly a movie with a mission—to cut through the cowshit ordinarily infesting modern-day westerns, contemporary views of life on and below... More >>

• Movies Intoxicate and Ruin Lives in Ripe Chinese Melodrama

  published December 6, 2005

  "It's like spending the whole night dreaming," muses the oafish protagonist of the new Chinese film Electric Shadows—he's talking... More >>

• Underseen Masterpiece Establishes Cinematic Theocracy

  published December 6, 2005

  The best European film of the 1980s? The greatest Balkan film ever made? The most eagerly awaited and long overdue DVD release of 2005? Yes, yes,... More >>

• Down and Out in Celebrity Swampland

  published December 6, 2005

  For many Federico Fellini may seem to be the most dated and retrospectively overinflated of all the New Wave era's headline acts, but La Dolce... More >>

• A Subversive Cherry Bomb

  published December 6, 2005

  Bernardo Bertolucci was only 28, with two features already behind him, when he birthed this high-spirited, subversive 1968 cherry bomb, which... More >>

• A Radioactive 'Nam-Era Portrait of American Divisiveness

  published November 29, 2005

  A key film in the unimpeachable cry-in-the-wilderness corpus of Peter Watkins—a major filmography long marginalized and only now being... More >>

• Fear Eats the Soul of This Unfortunate J-Horror Misfire

  published November 29, 2005

  Helmed by the J-horror hotshot behind the Ju-on films (and their Yankee Grudge remakes), and starring Tetsuo auteur Shinya... More >>

• I Confess

  published November 29, 2005

  He's the hyper-Homer of modern anxieties, the reigning champ of theorized and cross-examined pop cinema, but Hitchcock's work— substantially... More >>

• 'Krisana'

  published November 29, 2005

  Brooding existentialist Fred Kelemen goes to Latvia for his new film, a starkly black-and-white parable dripping with unspoken regrets and... More >>

• A Dean Koontz–Derived Genre Pound Cake

  published November 29, 2005

  The paradigmatic auteur maudit, Donald Cammell was always more legendary than praiseworthy, gathering in his Chelsea-set mythos everything you... More >>

• The Righteous Brothers

  published November 22, 2005

  The American cinema vérité movement—rhyming roughly alongside a culture-wide jones for truth-seeking that also gave rise to... More >>

• Down With Love: Promising Talents Deliver Whining Narcissism

  published November 22, 2005

  An earnest spume from the post-Linklater, neo–brat pack known as Young Hollywood, I Love Your Work promises with its very title to be... More >>

• Melville's Weighty Assassin Pic, Blueprint for a Genre

  published November 22, 2005

  A master of hyperbolic criminal coolness beloved by the nouvelle vague, Jean-Pierre Melville made 13 features in a 27-year career, but only a... More >>

• Film

  published November 22, 2005

  Unique among the great postwar New Waves, Brazil's Cinema Novo movement didn't merely utilize its garage band, hyper-indie cinema povera... More >>

• Drunk and Disorderly: A First-Time Director's Bawdy Goblet of Dire

  published November 15, 2005

  As the various filmizations of Sade clearly demonstrate, maximum-velocity hedonism is as difficult to capture on celluloid as creative process or... More >>

• Giant Ape Movies Finally Released

  published November 15, 2005

  Incredibly famous and yet the most badly needed Hollywood Golden Age classic DVD release, King Kong also arrives in time for Thanksgiving.... More >>