Email Author Michael Atkinson

2006 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• 'Land of the Blind'

  published June 6, 2006

  Wrongheaded and bizarrely outrageous, the first feature from Robert Edwards chronicles the madcap historical throes of a fictionalized ur-nation... More >>

• Progressive Scan

  published May 30, 2006

  In its 17th year as one of the city's oldest continuously running film festivals, and certainly the most thematically vital, the Human Rights... More >>

• Shohei Imamura, 1926–2006

  published May 30, 2006

  Define the Japanese New Wave however you like—there are innumerable possible launching points, and the name players evident in the '50s and... More >>

• Built Ford Tough

  published May 30, 2006

  To my tastes, the world has rarely harbored enough reservations about John Ford and has always held far too many about John Wayne, but everyone... More >>

• An Incisive Dissection of Culture Shock

  published May 30, 2006

  Once, Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray was one of international film culture's godheads, forming a generation's view of Indian culture... More >>

• Unshakable Gotham Vibe

  published May 30, 2006

  How quaint and bristly—like a plain-talking, bourbon-stinking grandfather who won't close his robe—these quintessential '70s policiers... More >>

• Casualties of War

  published May 23, 2006

  Among the Bush era's political docs, something called The Cult of the Suicide Bomber might seem a media redundancy—haven't we heard... More >>

• Bruising My Religion

  published May 23, 2006

  After 13 years of establishing his post-surrealist voice in the penny arcade of Mexican cinema, Luis Buñuel returned to Franco-ruled,... More >>

• 'Coastlines'

  published May 23, 2006

  No one can seem to think ill of regional humanist Victor Nuñez (Ruby in Paradise, Ulee's Gold), but this low-budget Florida... More >>

• 'Long Knives Night/ Reporting From the Rabbit Hutch'

  published May 23, 2006

  Ascuffed-knuckle preamble to next week's Human Rights Watch Film Festival, these two featurette docs by Belarusan filmmaker Victor Dashuk open a... More >>

• A Vast National Story Forgotten

  published May 23, 2006

  Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning socialist-cinema paradigm offers an extraordinarily detailed chronicle of an intimate, forgotten American war.... More >>

• Power-Grabbing Chaos

  published May 23, 2006

  Czech-German doc pope Harun Farocki, working with Andrei Ujica, assembles video footage shot by scores of sources during the week of riots that... More >>

• Louvre Story

  published May 16, 2006

  Stuffed with book learnin', worshipful of scholarship, queasy about violent action, and motored by anagrams and Riddler-style brainteasers, the... More >>

• Shear Madness

  published May 16, 2006

  Another sweaty French capsule of domestic apocalypse—somebody coin a regional genre label, quick— Emmanuel Carrére's La... More >>

• Since Otar Left

  published May 16, 2006

  Finally, can we canonize Otar Iosseliani, the Paris-stationed, Georgian-expat master of human ceremonies who has been building one of the world's... More >>

• 'Favela Rising'

  published May 16, 2006

  Working with fancy post-prod digitals courtesy of HBO, filmmakers Jeff Zimbalist and Matt Mochary bring the Brazilian ghetto experience to Middle... More >>

• 'What Is a Man Without a Mustache?'

  published May 16, 2006

  Among other things, the implosion of Yugoslavia has seemed to revitalize Slavic film culture, and fittingly for the generation of filmmakers... More >>

• Feverishly Beloved and Still Underseen

  published May 16, 2006

  Feverishly beloved and still underseen, Terrence Malick's fabulously Rousseauian imagining of the Jamestown-Pocahontas slice of American history... More >>

• Domestic Violence

  published May 9, 2006

  Exhilaratingly anxious, Dominik Moll's new film Lemming charts familiar territory but does it with gravity and panache. Truly, the... More >>

• 'The King'

  published May 9, 2006

  A rather beautifully produced indie mix of melodrama, ethnographic detail, and modern Southern gothic, The King begins with a symbolic... More >>

• Cold Case

  published May 9, 2006

  Midway through his passage toward the auroral vision of Mother and Son (1997) and the epic stunt of Russian Ark (2002), Aleksandr Sokurov... More >>

• Back in the USSR

  published May 9, 2006

  The Gable and Lombard of Soviet moviemaking's new wave, Elem Klimov and Larisa Shepitko were a gorgeous married couple of uncompromising artists... More >>

• A Dense World of Recurrences

  published May 9, 2006

  Patrick Keiller's daringly simple and yet fulsomely written meta-doc is composed of three fairly fundamental elements: footage of London shot in... More >>

• Just Add Water

  published May 2, 2006

  Our anemic movie industry recycles so relentlessly that even complaints about micro-remilling and plasticized repackaging are themselves recycled... More >>

• Rudy Awakening

  published May 2, 2006

  In the works since Rudolph Giuliani was still mayor and still policing the city with totalitarian quality-of-life tactics, Kevin Keating's doc ... More >>