Email Author Michael Atkinson

2006 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• Life Is Sweet

  published September 26, 2006

  Moving and ambitious in scale like nothing else in cinema, Michael Apted's Up films began in 1964 as a BBC news program exploring an old... More >>

• Satanic Verses

  published September 26, 2006

  A self-aggrandizing mythmaker, world traveler, and gadfly, South Africa–born Richard Stanley is something like a post–Cold War Erich von... More >>

• '. . . So Goes the Nation'

  published September 26, 2006

  A detailed and somewhat straggling account of the 2004 presidential election's flashpoint climax in Ohio, James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo's new... More >>

• Vivid and Zesty: Old-School Feminist Emancipation

  published September 26, 2006

  Old-school feminist emancipation from Swedish-star -turned–New Waver Mai Zetterling. Three actresses (Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, and... More >>

• Breathless Pop Filmmaking

  published September 26, 2006

  Korean phenom Park Chan-wook's films generally take his movie culture's yen for emotional meth and triple the dose; we know there will be no... More >>

• Blow Up

  published September 19, 2006

  The ex-Yugoslav nation-states are together building a unique brand of ethnic movie: embraceable comic nihilism, bleeding with memories of truly... More >>

• Redistributing the Wealth

  published September 19, 2006

  Whether they were bred in the musty rep houses of yesteryear, public TV, or video, cinephiles know the coin-on-blue-stucco logo of Janus Films... More >>

• 'Be With Me'

  published September 19, 2006

  Atentative Singaporean film that mixes documentary fact and scripted fiction in a way that's become terribly hip on the festival circuit, Be... More >>

• A Neverending Story–ish Saga

  published September 19, 2006

  Even if he's never actually made a film you can stand, you cannot ignore Takashi Miike—no one working today is as preposterously fecund, has... More >>

• Inconvenient Truths

  published September 12, 2006

  Many people, even the best kind of pissed-off anti-corporate progressives, can't get their stomachs around Michael Moore, but it's impossible to... More >>

• Populist Mechanics

  published September 12, 2006

  According to its publicity, bringing Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel All the King's Men to the screen again has always been a "cherished... More >>

• 'Sólo Con Tu Pareja'

  published September 12, 2006

  The buzz arising from Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También, his franchise-high-water work with Harry Potter, and... More >>

• Prague Sprung

  published September 5, 2006

  The almost ubiquitous Prague surrealist Jan Svankmajer, well into his seventies now, may be the season's secret man of the hour, with his new... More >>

• 'The Ground Truth'

  published September 5, 2006

  The newest activist doc from Iraq, joining a deafening yowl of media dissent, Patricia Foulkrod's The Ground Truth gets its voice entirely... More >>

• 'Keeping Mum'

  published September 5, 2006

  Exactly the sort of coy, patronizing pap you'd imagine actors like Kristin Scott Thomas and Maggie Smith take merely to pay debts or mortgages,... More >>

• Night Watch

  published August 29, 2006

  Shaped like a relentless blues chant, Ramin Bahrani's hand-sized film Man Push Cart casts a watchful eye on an overlooked New York... More >>

• Panic Womb

  published August 29, 2006

  A number of pregnant mysteries arise with the new remake of Robin Hardy's 1973 cult-remembered genre work—namely, what's in this kind of... More >>

• Hang Time

  published August 29, 2006

  Displaced Prussians Fritz Lang and Bertolt Brecht manufactured this shrill 1943 five-course meal of Hollywood propaganda as nearly a parody of the... More >>

• 'Mizoguchi'

  published August 29, 2006

  In some danger of being overlooked in the press of history that reveres Ozu's rigorous constancy and Kurosawa's noble pulp, Kenji Mizoguchi is a... More >>

• 'Le Petit Lieutenant'

  published August 29, 2006

  Xavier Beauvois's new French policier Le Petit Lieutenant conscientiously eschews virtually everything we've come to expect from the genre:... More >>

• 'Saint of 9/11'

  published August 29, 2006

  And so the teary, elegiac movie-stories from the war zone of 9-11 continue, each simultaneously fevered with wounded mourning and jockeying for... More >>

• The Reign and Downfall of Alberto Fujimori

  published August 29, 2006

  Ellen Perry's doc analyzes the reign and downfall of Peruvian plundercrat Alberto Fujimori, whose instructively Bush-like dictatorship raped the... More >>

• Fever Dream

  published August 22, 2006

  An archival film-geek event, this long-neglected 1922 detour in German master F.W. Murnau's tragically brief career is a reverent morality play... More >>

• 'Looking for Kitty'

  published August 22, 2006

  Clearly, Ed Burns feels he has something to say about working-class New York Irish guys and their beery romantic problems, but after seven... More >>

• A Chinese Adventure Eco-Saga

  published August 22, 2006

  This 2004 Chinese adventure eco-saga takes on the poaching of the endangered Tibetan antelope, skirting the thornier political questions while... More >>