Email Author Michael Atkinson

2005 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• Father Knows Best: Wexler Duo Keeps It All in the Family

  published May 10, 2005

  "If you don't know where the fuck we are right now," cinematography lion Haskell Wexler barks to his camera-bearing son at the onset of Tell... More >>

• Black Beauty: Spencer Suspenser Tops 'Controversial' Box

  published May 10, 2005

  This 1955 social-issue thriller remains one of its decade's most distinctive Hollywood films, iconic, socially sophisticated, and courageous.... More >>

• Casual Chronicle of Film Production as Frankensteinian Violation of Natural Laws

  published May 10, 2005

  Probably the best and most compulsively fascinating movie ever made about a moviemaker, Les Blank and Maureen Gosling's epochal 1982 documentary... More >>

• Jail for Over-Earnest Anarchist in Bitter, Tolstoy-Derived Farce

  published May 10, 2005

  A distinctive and restless force in European cinema for nearly five decades, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani achieved from their first films an... More >>

• Jungle Horror and Sweaty Erotica From a Thai Cinema Bigwig

  published May 3, 2005

  Involved up to his eyeballs in virtually every Thai film you've ever heard of (that includes producing Bang Rajan and the ill-fated... More >>

• Unoriginal Gangster

  published May 3, 2005

  Cloned out of a dozen or more recent movies that were themselves genetic thefts from older films, the new Brit-bad-boy potboiler Layer Cake... More >>

• Classic Fairy Tale Gone Wrong: Grieving King Lusts After Daughter

  published May 3, 2005

  Recently restored, this buttery Perrault-derived romp directed in 1970 by singsong nouvelle vague fantasist Jacques Demy offers,... More >>

• Reviving Hollywood's Aboriginal Scandal Victim

  published May 3, 2005

  If the name of Olive Thomas meant anything to filmgoers in the last 30 years or so, it was only due to Kenneth Anger's Hollywood... More >>

• All's Well That Ends Welles: Orson's Slippery Sleight of Hand

  published April 26, 2005

  Simultaneously slapdash and Borgesian, Orson Welles's late-career nonfiction board game of a movie may be, by ordinary standards, the most... More >>

• Holy Crap

  published April 26, 2005

  What more spectacular and reverent way to celebrate the selection of the world's richest and most sanctimonious corporation's new puppethead than... More >>

• Melting Plot: Haggis's Hyperbolic Civics Lesson a Minor Wreck

  published April 26, 2005

  A daisy-chain civics lesson about race that makes Spike Lee seem pianissimo, Million Dollar Baby scripter Paul Haggis's directorial debut,... More >>

• American Party Chick and Poodles Flee Nazis, Live Well

  published April 26, 2005

  Who was Constance Bennett? Joan's older sister; a snarky, mannered go-girl paradigm for the talkie era; Cary Grant's ghostly partner in... More >>

• Miike's J-Horror Follows Formula; C-List Zombie Spoof Stumbles

  published April 12, 2005

  By this time, it's clear that Takashi Miike can and eventually will make every kind of movie—his filmography already teems with formula gore,... More >>

• Impetuous, Seminal Anti-War Rumination From Mid-Century Poland

  published April 12, 2005

  The fumigation of the New Wave basement continues with Facets' DVD-ization of Andrzej Munk, the Sturges-cum-Tati satirist of Polish post-war... More >>

• Arguably the Greatest British Movie of the Silent Era

  published April 12, 2005

  From the magic-hour year of 1927 comes this semi-forgotten, plaintive melodrama, arguably the greatest British movie of the silent era. Directed... More >>

• 1997 Iranian Wonder Is Simple as a Knife Edge Yet Endlessly Entertaining

  published April 5, 2005

  Although this 1997 Iranian wonder—from director-Kiarostami student Jafar Panahi (The Circle, Crimson Gold)—fetched a Best... More >>

• Czech Totalitarian Life Square in the Eye

  published April 5, 2005

  Forever overshadowed internationally by the nouvelle vague, the decade-long Prague Spring, whence came Czech voices like Milos Forman, Ivan... More >>

• Lip Service: Alain Resnais Adapts a Buoyant 1920s Operetta

  published March 29, 2005

  The French New Wave's great, forlorn metaphysician Alain Resnais has not seen his stock rise in his dotage; art film meteors like Hiroshima Mon... More >>

• Back in the Saddle

  published March 29, 2005

  Play it again, Sam. A blustery, madcap preamble to the full-blooded anti-westerns that Mr. Peckinpah scorched our earth with a few years later and... More >>

• Triple X

  published March 29, 2005

  Among the assortment of extratextual things going on deep in the muddle of Eros, there's the indulgence of the omnibus film, an idiot... More >>

• Sneaky Agenda in Okamoto's Landmark Modernist Anti-Samurai Saga

  published March 29, 2005

  Kihachi Okamoto's landmark modernist anti-samurai saga has a sneaky agenda: We meet expert swordsman Ryunosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai) amid a seemingly... More >>

• Five-Hour-Plus, Five-Chapter Alexander Sokurov Documentary

  published March 29, 2005

  What a world—this five-hour-plus, five-chapter Alexander Sokurov documentary never had a chance at theatrical distribution even in Europe,... More >>

• A Talking Picture

  published March 22, 2005

  Making middle-class character ensembles safe for moviegoers, Agnès Jaoui has mastered the manufacture of interpersonal naturalism. Look... More >>

• Culture Shocks: Craig Baldwin's Magnetic Assemblages

  published March 22, 2005

  Sonic Outlaws/Spectres of the Spectrum Other Cinema/Facets Subterranean poet of paranoia, bricolage wizard Craig... More >>

• Breezy Living: Sturges's Premature Maturity

  published March 22, 2005

  By an oceanic margin the most distinguished screenwriting voice to emerge from the Golden Age fun factory, Preston Sturges is to be revered for... More >>