Email Author Michael Atkinson

2005 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• A Symphonic Series Shows How Music Can Carry a Toon

  published August 9, 2005

  If movies—in every tangential form they take—could be considered a mass intoxicant, then cartoons are the audiovisual equivalent of... More >>

• Hookers Infest a Bombed-Out, Post-War Tokyo

  published August 9, 2005

  The Criterion Collection continues its project of unleashing the filmography of Japanese subversive pulp pope Seijun Suzuki with this 1964... More >>

• Claws and Effect

  published August 2, 2005

  Closing out this summer's Werner Herzog hat trick, Grizzly Man is something of an anomaly in the man's encyclopedic nonfiction corpus.... More >>

• Romancing the Milestone

  published August 2, 2005

  If Milestone isn't quite the runaway winner of stateside art-film/retro theatrical and video distribution (Kino, First Run, Wellspring, and Facets... More >>

• Crime Scene Investigations From an Aging New Waver

  published August 2, 2005

  From where we sit, Claude Chabrol may seem to be the most ubiquitous of the aging French New Wavers, but only about half of his last... More >>

• Idiosyncrat Russian: World's Most Inhospitable Filmmaker

  published August 2, 2005

  Famed Russian idiosyncrat Kira Muratova might just be the world's most inhospitable filmmaker, demanding (and getting) respect as a living... More >>

• Heartbreak Hotel

  published July 26, 2005

  Coming at us along the suspenseful trajectory of a meteor we've helplessly watched approach for five years now, Wong Kar-wai's 2046 is... More >>

• Technicolor Vistas and Clichéd Exotica in Restored Renoir

  published July 26, 2005

  Well-heeled with decades of kudos (and citations from the André Bazin army), Jean Renoir's The River (1951) makes a restored-print... More >>

• 'Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision'

  published July 26, 2005

  Thoroughly in love with 19th-century etchings of every baroque variety, this hour-long documentary is otherwise primed for PBS, complete with... More >>

• A Beautiful Troublemaker: Rivette's Mystery Without Facts

  published July 26, 2005

  Unaccountably but inspiring little surprise, Jacques Rivette's 2003 film found no theatrical takers here, so the DVD should count as a release. It... More >>

• Classic European and American 'Underground' Shorts

  published July 26, 2005

  This is what DVDs were invented for: a dizzyingly fecund, two-disc compilation of 25 classic shorts from the salad days of European and American... More >>

• A Revived Masterpiece Is This Summer's Finest Roman Holiday

  published July 19, 2005

  Now can begin my summer of love: Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) arrives at Film Forum in a torrent of silk and shadow, an... More >>

• Bush League

  published July 19, 2005

  I was but a wee moviegoing shaver, but The Bad News Bears (1976), possibly the least condescending Hollywood film ever made about kids,... More >>

• Prague Rock: A Smashup of Shorts From a Surrealist Polymath

  published July 19, 2005

  The notorious animator of Prague arrives on DVD in force, in more ways than one. This two-disc package contains not only 14 of his most famous... More >>

• Gender Combat Oratorio Slips Genesis a Microdot

  published July 19, 2005

  The other New Waves never had anyone resembling Czech cine-anarchist Vera Chytilov whose movies represent a radical disruption of narrative and... More >>

• Jeunet's Monster of WW I Hellishness

  published July 19, 2005

  Jean-Pierre Jeunet's monster of serendipity, blind devotion, and WW I hellishness is an easy movie to be cynical about, if that's how you fill... More >>

• Sorting Through a Real-Life Meta-Mess in an Iranian Landmark

  published July 12, 2005

  In many ways the paradigmatic work in the Iranian-new-wave Godardian-knot filmography, this unceremonious, 1996 hall of mirrors by Mohsen... More >>

• Sweaty Bottoms Hit Rock Bottom in New Winterbottom

  published July 12, 2005

  Michael Winterbottom has the charged air of a Rimbaudian decadent—he's hell-bent on trying everything once, and if he gives up filmmaking to... More >>

• 'Throw Down'

  published July 12, 2005

  In a film culture still jacked on its own irreverent speed, Hong Kong maestro Johnnie To's films have a beguiling offhandedness—as if absurd... More >>

• French Screwball One of the Year's Best Imports

  published July 12, 2005

  Who's afraid of Chantal Akerman? The Belgian-born, post-New Wave rebel has, like compatriots Resnais and Rivette, lightened with age, and her... More >>

• Iberia Breaks From Europe in Digital-Magical-Realist Fable

  published July 12, 2005

  A high-toned Euro freak—a Spanish production directed by nomadic Dutchman George Sluizer (The Vanishing), the only film adaptation... More >>

• A Forgotten Landmark Chronicles the Empire of the 'Sun Tribe'

  published July 5, 2005

  "We live in boring times," someone says early in this 1956 Japanese totem movie, the defining film of the post-war "sun tribe" ( taiyozoku)... More >>

• One of Werner Herzog's Bottomless Mysteries

  published July 5, 2005

  Viva la Werner! The cataract of Herzogiana continues with the overdue DVD release of this hypnotic 1971 film—his first feature-length... More >>

• Greatest and Leanest of Forgotten Noirs

  published July 5, 2005

  Among the greatest and leanest of forgotten noirs, Richard Fleischer's 1952 micro-crucible runs only 71 minutes and is a model for visual and... More >>

• Irreconcilable Differences

  published June 28, 2005

  A fusty, quaint blast from the art-house past, Ingmar Bergman's Saraband rolls out with anachronistic boldness—were imported movies... More >>