Email Author Michael Atkinson

2005 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• Film

  published June 28, 2005

  Nobody, it can be said, has had as great an impact and influence on cinema history with as little film—less than three hours, all... More >>

• Vietnam-to-Texas refugee weepie offers earnest simplicity

  published June 28, 2005

  The drama of refugeeism may be the modern globe's most pervasive social crisis, but movies are just beginning to probe the experience, tragic as... More >>

• Armageddon It

  published June 21, 2005

  This year's designated summer vacation Bigfoot, Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds scans like a new-millennium-blockbuster mission... More >>

• Dead Again

  published June 21, 2005

  What a world George Romero has single-handedly given us—now four living-dead films, two remakes of those four, and 10,000 rip-offs all... More >>

• The heat that Heart skipped: An introverted Toback remake

  published June 21, 2005

  The borders of James Toback's fiery, absurd, and often unendurable movie universe are defined by his obsessions (pussy, classical... More >>

• Twin freaks: David Cronenberg's body panic masterpiece

  published June 21, 2005

  The keynote address in what has become—rising out of the neurotic bath of 1970s exploitation films—one of world cinema's most original... More >>

• Empress Josephine: Baker's Empowering Eroticism Reborn

  published June 14, 2005

  A key, recently rediscovered figure in the history of racial cinema and an early-20th-century pop phenom, St. Louis-born Josephine Baker was a... More >>

• Oh, the Nora, the Nora: Every Little Thing She Does Is Tragic

  published June 14, 2005

  I have no idea why Hollywood makes movies derived from TV series that the all-important 15- to 25-year-old ticket-buying demographic has... More >>

• CSI: Gyeonggi

  published June 14, 2005

  A police procedural like no other, Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder (2003) has the epic aura of a sociographic novel, but you won't see a... More >>

• Excess Express

  published June 7, 2005

  Count our blessings. No sooner does the screaming summer-movie emptiness begin to envelop the city than Subway Cinema's annual fest of new East... More >>

• Cape and Scowl

  published June 7, 2005

  Since Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997) devolved an already campy superhero franchise into a... More >>

• Summertime in a Small Town: Nowhere Girls in an Idle Idyll

  published June 7, 2005

  Last Resort, Pawel Pawlikowski's previous film, was a pitch-perfect, post-Loachian portrait of refugee idleness in the lowlands of Kent, so... More >>

• My Life as Seed of a Tobacco Mogul

  published June 7, 2005

  In a more thoughtful world, a new film bearing Ross McElwee's sympathetic, cogent, witty cinematic voice would be an event. Continuing the... More >>

• For Those With Gaps in Their Sellers-Ography

  published June 7, 2005

  As Warren Beatty used to introduce himself, according to neophyte screenwriter Woody Allen, but this DVD release's occasion is to gaze in... More >>

• King of the Castle

  published May 31, 2005

  Oscar winner, New Yorker profilee, and international name-above-the-title, Hayao Miyazaki is the one-man standing answer to the American... More >>

• Sam Fuller's Passionate Pulp Western Leads With Its Hips

  published May 31, 2005

  Why hasn't this 1957 Sam Fuller frontier epic—his most ludicrously passionate, faux-muscular,... More >>

• Offering a Post-War, Money-Hungry U.S.

  published May 31, 2005

  In its day, film noir had its epitomes, but many of the most distinctive films to catch the label since—like Edmund Goulding's notorious,... More >>

• Brando Flicks From Pre-Reagan Salad Days

  published May 31, 2005

  Perhaps it's little surprise that so many movie artifacts from the post-WW II, pre-Reagan salad days seem to be prophecies of the present, but... More >>

• The Aviator

  published May 24, 2005

  Any day in which I'm able to step into the gaze path of extreme, globe-trotting seeker-of-otherworldliness Werner Herzog—like a matinee... More >>

• Harrowing Ideological Cinema Based on a Sermonic Tolstoy

  published May 24, 2005

  Robert Bresson's final film—made when he was 81—is a harrowing scour of ideological cinema, based on a sermonic Tolstoy story about... More >>

• Escape From Zoo York

  published May 17, 2005

  A modest, fast, and relatively painless all-digital cartoon, the new DreamWorks money milker belongs to what is now a time- and profit-petrified... More >>

• Another Reason to Love Steve McQueen

  published May 17, 2005

  Looking back, it seems as if Steve McQueen might've shared a rope of movie star DNA with Humphrey Bogart—both modest-sized, weathered, not... More >>

• A Lyrical Take on Chad's Missing Dads

  published May 17, 2005

  Lyrical and stoic, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Abouna is set on the western frontier of Chad and focused on the vacuum left by vanishing... More >>

• Don't Luke Now: Episodes VII–IX

  published May 10, 2005

  First George Lucas said there'd be three trilogies, now he whines there'll be only two, but don't believe him. How can you leave Luke and the... More >>

• Repossessed

  published May 10, 2005

  In 100 years of movie business goldbricking, impulse production, and high-flying market pursuit, we've never seen anything quite like this: a... More >>