Email Author Michael Atkinson

2006 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• 'Cartoons: No Laughing Matter?'

  published May 2, 2006

  The premise of Film Forum's motley week of animations isn't so much humorlessness—most of the featured shorts are wickedly funny—but the... More >>

• Will Occupy Your Skull Like a Siege of Huns

  published May 2, 2006

  Mexican barn burner Carlos Reygadas's second feature is a portentous, magnificent movie and a half, teeming with insidious visual ideas and a... More >>

• Small Town Anomie and Liquored Exhaustion

  published May 2, 2006

  Facets continues to slowly make its way through the much vaunted but underdistributed corpus of Hungarian dyspeptic Béla Tarr, one of the... More >>

• Modern Love and Its Discontents

  published April 25, 2006

  Despairing Korean New Wave structuralist Hong Sang-soo's second film, this 1998 ballade is surely the movement's most critic-revered work, and a... More >>

• Pickup on Houston Street

  published April 25, 2006

  A this late date, what we think about when we think about noir is often little more than a result of its commodification—a history that is... More >>

• Banned in the Middle East

  published April 25, 2006

  Because Syria does not have an authentic film industry of its own, the native movies collected for this inspired Walter Reade retro are (a) mostly... More >>

• Partial Arts

  published April 25, 2006

  Coming closer even than Zhang Yimou's Hero and House of Flying Daggers to resembling the Chinese cover art for a vintage Iron... More >>

• A Loony Visionary's Alternate Realities

  published April 25, 2006

  Obsessives who follow their vision and/ or aesthetic strategy over the cliff edge and right into the abyss are difficult to appreciate; how could... More >>

• Love in Vein

  published April 18, 2006

  Junkie recovery sagas rarely come from a place of heartfelt experience—Olivier Assayas's Clean, like virtually every major film about... More >>

• The End of Violence

  published April 18, 2006

  By now, for masses of believers in mad Korean pulp as it has been epitomized by Park Chanwook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and... More >>

• Multiple Versions of Welles's Unfinished Symphony, With Footnotes

  published April 18, 2006

  Ah, Orson, the bullgoose haunter of movies' Memory Lane, the crazed king of cinema lost and, sometimes, regained. Here is one such recrystallized... More >>

• New York African Film Festival

  published April 18, 2006

  Forever subject to industrial poverty and political bedlam like virtually nowhere else on earth, the sub-Saharan African film industries have... More >>

• 'The Lost City'

  published April 18, 2006

  Among Hollywoodized glosses on the Cuban revolution, if Sydney Pollack's Havana was a tracing from Casablanca, Andy Garcia's... More >>

• Manufactured Images and the Origins of Reality Television

  published April 11, 2006

  Did Peter Watkins create reality TV? He'd spit in my eye at the suggestion, but decades before that grim entertainment paradigm began to cancer... More >>

• 'Stolen'

  published April 11, 2006

  A fancy-feast doc about art theft, Rebecca Dreyfus's Stolen has all the earmarks of a ropy New Yorker article—the plumbing of a... More >>

• 'Mongolian Ping Pong'

  published April 11, 2006

  Much more so than any movie actually about spiritual discipline, the new Chinese film Mongolian Ping Pong could be a meditational... More >>

• Before There Was 'Saturday Night Live'

  published April 11, 2006

  It's a lost art—the short comedy talkie, produced by the hundreds during Hollywood's so-called golden age as nothing more than bonus gifts... More >>

• The Most Luxurious Launch of K-Horror

  published April 11, 2006

  The most luxurious launch of K-horror yet, Kim Ji-woon's moody chiller begins with the young titular sisters being brought to live with a... More >>

• On Dangerous Ground

  published April 4, 2006

  By their nature, conservationist melodramas are tough to put over: Unless you torture science Roland Emmerich–style, the concrete concerns... More >>

• Catherine the Great

  published April 4, 2006

  There was something about the sexually agape, porcelainized tabula rasa of Catherine Deneuve in her stardom's infancy that fed the dream lives of... More >>

• Pre-Mortem

  published April 4, 2006

  An unassuming, unadventurous, but likable dramedy about dying and grief, Sarah Watt's debut feature, Look Both Ways, has been something of an... More >>

• For Italian New Wave Social Resonance, Pick Pocket

  published April 4, 2006

  A long-overdue screamer from the semi-forgotten, underscreened New Wave archives, Marco Bellocchio's 1965 debut "started something" in Italian... More >>

• 'Days of Heaven'

  published April 4, 2006

  It was Terrence Malick's last film before his notorious 20-year hiatus, it was Sam Shepard's introduction to moviegoers, and it seems almost... More >>

• Nightmares of TV's Messy Adolescence

  published April 4, 2006

  Though it may have been some kind of career-long desire for George Clooney, whose father was a Cincinnati and Lexington broadcaster through much... More >>

• Down for the Count

  published March 28, 2006

  You may still retain your ardor and respect, as I have, for the pressure-point hammerblow Quentin Tarantino executed on American movies, but it's... More >>