Email Author Michael Atkinson

2010 Stories by Michael Atkinson

• Grief Gone Mad in Secret Sunshine

  published December 22, 2010

  Buried in the year-end rush but one of the year’s best films, Lee Chang-dong’s rending, hyperventilating follow-up to 2002’s... More >>

• The Full Bertolucci

  published December 15, 2010

  Radical flamethrower to Arthouse Apollo to Oscar-winning mastodon-driver to decadent mezzobrow doodler, Bernardo Bertolucci’s career has... More >>

• Rabbit a la Berlin: European History, From the Bunnies' POV

  published December 8, 2010

  Rejiggering the history of postwar Germany into a Shel Silverstein–ish fairy tale about bunnies, Bartek Konopka’s quasi-doc spins the... More >>

• The Hemingway Unadaptability Principle Prevails in The Garden of Eden

  published December 8, 2010

  Airily disregarding the Hemingway Unadaptability Principle, this quaintly racy version of Papa’s most hated novel has a few bullets in its... More >>

• Total Badass/Hell on Wheels: In the Gutter and on the Roller Rink With Austin Double Feature

  published November 17, 2010

  Bob Ray, Austin’s newish lowbrow Maysles brother, has taken his two latest features on the road, comprising the pro-am doc equivalent to... More >>

• 25 Years of Larry Fessenden

  published October 20, 2010

  Ubiquitous indie gadfly, advocate, and producer, Larry Fessenden has, for a quarter-century now, busily championed the deployment of depth and... More >>

• The Women Are Out for Bloody Revenge in Japanese Gothic Horror Kuroneko

  published October 20, 2010

  Nippo-Gothic horror fables have a long tradition of proto-feminist outrage—the metaphysical issue of the genre almost always revolves... More >>

• Living Life on a One-Sixth Scale in Marwencol

  published October 6, 2010

  Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do, Jeff Malmberg’s... More >>

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  Sci-Fi? Zenith Imagines a Future When No One is Happy in Brooklyn or Queens

  published September 29, 2010

  "The film they don’t want you to see," by "Anonymous," shouts the teaser, prefaced by warnings of legal threats and "illegal" images.... More >>

• Wasted Downtown: A Restored On the Bowery

  published September 15, 2010

  In a very real sense the ultimate New York movie, Lionel Rogosin's On the Bowery (1957) is cinema-as-bog-body, living history captured... More >>

• Even Cowgirls Go to Jail: Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo

  published September 15, 2010

  A feel-good sports movie you can wrap your thighs around without blushing, Bradley Beesley's film opens the door into two arenas doc-watchers... More >>

• Guerrilla Epic Battle of Chile, Back Onscreen at the Maysles

  published September 8, 2010

  In the running for the most riveting and vital historical document ever put on celluloid, Patricio Guzmán's 1975–78 guerrilla epic... More >>

• Prince of Broadway Is Neo-Doc Super-Realism All the Time

  published September 1, 2010

  Permit-free, no-budget Manhattan indie Sean Baker returns with another palm-size street gadget, shot on the shoulder amid real crowds in... More >>

• Decades Collide in Micro-Indie Black Comedy Modern Love Is Automatic

  published August 18, 2010

  A peppery, 'tude-laden micro-indie out of the Virginia–D.C. lowlands, Zach Clark's Modern Love Is Automatic seems at first to be... More >>

• An Epic-in-Training, Animal Kingdom, Suffers for Its Ambition

  published August 11, 2010

  Happily sampling nasty beats and riffs from the Scorsese catalog, the new Aussie crime saga Animal Kingdom begins with a hushed but... More >>

• Like Father Not Like Son: Goro Miyazaki's Tales From Earthsea

  published August 11, 2010

  This 2006 Ghibli Studios adaptation of the Ursula K. Le Guin novels is the handiwork of first-timer Goro Miyazaki, son of Hayao—and the... More >>

• Seven of the Best from the NY Asian Film Fest

  published June 22, 2010

  By now a programming institution in its eighth hyperactive annual episode, the New York Asian Film Festival is one of American film culture's... More >>

• 'The Calm After the Storm: Making Sense of Lebanon’s Civil War ' at Walter Reade

  published May 4, 2010

  Being not Lebanese, I wouldn’t mind having the circumstances, alignments and meanings of the country’s 15 years of cataclysmic civil... More >>

• 'Bearing Witness: The Films of Bahman Ghobadi' at Walter Reade

  published April 13, 2010

  The planet’s lone major Kurdish filmmaker, Bahman Ghobadi is also the most satirical and least self-conscious of the big Iranian New Wave... More >>

• Sunrise (A Song of Two Humans), at Film Forum

  published March 30, 2010

  F.W. Murnau's career-peak nova, the crowning film from that sacred, edge-of-the-abyss year of 1927, is so commonly and universally hallowed... More >>

• Close-Up: Iranian New Wave's Seminal Creation

  published March 24, 2010

  Although Abbas Kiarostami seems to be receding into a Godardian cave of late, this must-see 1990 artichoke—in many ways, the Iranian New... More >>

• Kimjongilia Addresses the Mess that Is North Korea

  published March 16, 2010

  An impressionistic primer-doc on the state of the mess that is North Korea, this odd debut takes most of its time interviewing refugees that... More >>

• 'Storm Warnings: Resistance and Reflection in Polish Cinema' at Walter Reade

  published February 2, 2010

  This moody sample-platter of Polish movies, all made between 1977 and 1982 as the unionizing Solidarity movement gained ground and power, hone... More >>

• Sontag's Promised Lands at Anthology

  published February 2, 2010

  As we well know, they don't make Susan Sontags anymore—hot, newsmaking ur-intellectuals whose essays were events to equal their subjects,... More >>

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  Rediscovering the Japanese Horror Flick House

  published January 12, 2010

  It may be impossible not to be stunned into dumbness by Nobuhiko Obayashi's Hausu (House), an incredibly 1987 Japanese horror... More >>