“The Dark Knight Rises” debuts more new character posters
Has the Sacha Baron Cohen shtick jumped the shark?
Tim Grierson on Will Smith, the Last Movie Star
Exclusive download: Corporal, featuring Michael Shannon, presents “Glory”
Ah, minimalism, the miserable hairshirt pajamas so many critics still love to put on in the semi-privacy of their vocations, ostensibly separating them from the herd of passive filmgoers like enlightened monks separated from the peasantry — or, at least, so it may seem to the mainstream, who have been trained from the cradle to…
By Michael Atkinson “Our starved instincts have been clamoring for centuries for more and more substitutes,” Henry Miller once wrote, “and as a substitute for living the cinema is ideal.” There may not be a single filmmaker that Miller’s cynical observation describes better, sans the cynicism, than Jack Smith, famed New York avant-gardist, gay downtown…
By Michael Atkinson The most fabulous and fascinating thing about Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notoriously terminal film “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” (1975) is its intractability, its single-minded evasion of traditional matters of visual pleasure, narrative, spectator experience and thematic thrust. Calling it a “masterpiece,” as transgression-obsessed critics have done, or an “abomination,” as…
By Michael Atkinson The new Chinese documentary “Please Vote for Me” (2007) has an irresistible arc: take a class of average middle class third-graders, give them the opportunity to vote for “class monitor;” tell the three candidates that they have to run campaigns, in order to net as many votes as they can; and let…
By Michael Atkinson Who is Lech Majewski? Among other things, he’s something of a newfound challenge for the critic and budding cinephile. A tireless and passionate Euro artiste of a kind that gets often relegated to the “underground” or “experimental” categories in this country, but who also employs old-fashioned surrealism and sometimes nets name actors…
By Michael Atkinson The farther we get from it, the clearer it seems that the Age of the Waves — the ’60s and ’70s, roughly demarcated — was film culture’s own belle époque, glowing with post-teen hoochie koo and experimental piss and vinegar and hard-won grit, wherever movie tickets were sold and film stock could…
By Michael Atkinson We’ve been trained nowadays to believe that if a mainstream movie is not a monstrous, definitive, top-heavy, eye-blasting, eardrum-bruising mega-event, it’s not worth seeing. Gone are the cultural aesthetics of the double bill (in which no one film was so commanding that it couldn’t stand to be immediately followed by another), the…
By Michael Atkinson Chances are you’ve never seen a wholphin (a rare hybrid of dolphin and false killer whale), or a Wholphin, the short film DVD magazine emanating on a subscription basis from the Dave Eggers/McSweeney’s publishing factory. But it might be the most relentlessly fascinating and inventive showcase for new short films in the…
By Michael Atkinson The behemothic, almost impossible to see, hardcore-critic-exalted art film legends keep coming at us on DVD — will there be any Holy Grails left? — but it’s likely that no movie has been awaited as intensely and with as high expectations as Béla Tarr’s “Satantango” (1994). Finally, after literally years of rumors…
By Michael Atkinson It’s amazing to contemplate, but world cinema didn’t really make serious feature films about children until after WWII; Vittorio De Sica’s “Shoeshine” (1946) might’ve been the first. (You could stretch and consider Hal Roach’s vivid and roughhewn “Our Gang” shorts as qualifying, and I wouldn’t argue.) After the New Waves got rolling,…
By Michael Atkinson As the Fifth Generation of Chinese cinema squander their seriousness trying to out-”Crouching Tiger” each other, the subsequent “Sixth Generation” has raised the bar without going ancient-era historical or relying on the hotsiness of Gong Li. Namely, Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye and Zhang Yuan have favored a kind of philosophical realism, and…
By Michael Atkinson Nobody seemed quite capable of dismissing or faintly praising, then dismissing “My Blueberry Nights” (2007) fast enough when it wandered into American theaters this April — it was as if the collective unconscious had decided to make Wong Kar-wai pay in little cuts for both the demanding ordeal he put us all…
By Michael Atkinson To each fiery cinema individualist his own honorial DVD box set: here we have a reacquaintance — or initiation, for the babies of the Reagan/Thatcher era — with the unique howl of Derek Jarman, dead in 1994 from AIDS at the age of 52, a career attenuated by the very same fate…
By Michael Atkinson Maybe it’s jumping the gun to say so, but is the Romanian New Wave kaput already? The latest and most-Cannes-honored post-postmodern, hyperrealist, ex-dictatorship, young-auteur film movement seems to have already fizzled — after Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (2007) emerged with last year’s Palme D’Or, nothing new has…
By Michael Atkinson I’m sorry, but if my choices are superheroes, Sarah Jessica Parker’s handbag materialism, Ashton Kutcher, learn-to-love-again indies and an Adam Sandler comedy that couldn’t even muster jokes enough for a two-minute trailer, then I’ll stay home and have a conversation with Chris Marker. I’ll at least be assured of having truthful contact…
By Michael Atkinson One of the pioneering wagon-train movies of the inaugural, New York-based independent film movement, predating Jarmusch’s “Stranger than Paradise,” Bette Gordon’s “Variety” (1983) comes off in retrospect as a veritable time capsule of post-punk downtown coolness. Just read the credits: screenwriter Kathy Acker (experimental novelist), star/photog Nan Goldin (famed shutterbug and model…
By Michael Atkinson Like a missing-link hominid stepping out of the jungle, famous photographer William Klein emerges on 21st century DVD as the great bullgoose Art Film-era satirist we never knew we had. Hallowed for his still images and his documentaries, the Paris-based Klein also made three furiously hostile lampoons that were nominally released, ignored…
By Michael Atkinson “A Film in the Making” is how Jean-Luc Godard defined “La Chinoise” (1967) in the film itself, in one of its many aphoristic title card face-slaps, and it’s a simple parameter with which to view all Godard: as a process, not a product; as interrogation, not “entertainment”; and as a refutation of…
By Michael Atkinson Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There” (2007) is such a risky, ambitious, passionate conceptual big-brain freak of a movie that, whether you find yourself loving it or hating it or not knowing what in hell to make of it, you can sympathize and even agree with anyone who ends up with the opposite…
By Michael Atkinson Malian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako may have made the one African film everybody needs to see — at least for its disarming fugue of frank political awareness and state-of-the-quotidian African life. In most other ways, though, “Bamako” (2006) is a challenge to orthodoxy, because it’s not driven by its narrative, and hardly even…
By Michael Atkinson Todd Rohal’s “The Guatemalan Handshake” is one of the most inventive, most poetic, most disarmingly authentic indies of the last few years — so, of course, you’ve never had a chance to see it. It’s a movie that seems to have dropped out of the sky, inexplicably, like a satellite fragment landing…
By Michael Atkinson Though it may seem unfair at first, let’s pick up Joe Swanberg’s “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” heft it in our grips for a moment, and then use it to beat this thing called “mumblecore” to a pulp. Implicitly a kind of low-budge, ultra-spontaneous, all-HDV answer to the glossy fatuousness of current American…
By Michael Atkinson One of 2007′s breakout indie hits, “Lars and the Real Girl” was just high-profile enough, profitable enough, acted-by-Ryan-Gosling- within-an-inch-of-its-life enough and conspicuously life-affirming enough to, in the end, warrant a substantial backlash. But a backlash descends every year on overpumped movies as naturally as autumn comes to summer, inevitably, and we need…
By Michael Atkinson A distinctive force in European cinema for over 35 years, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani achieved from their first films an eloquent stylistic bridge between Rossellinian stringency and Fellinian braggadocio. Their movies are often framed like friezes, but the chaos of human whim always muddies the compositions. Appropriately, the Tavianis began as political…
By Michael Atkinson On its surface, Ang Lee’s career has been distinguished by a seemingly aimless ricochet between nations and milieus (Taiwan, New York, Wyoming, Devon, Shanghai, Connecticut, etc.), and between adapted disparate source materials (Jane Austen, Rick Moody, Annie Proulx, Wang Du Lu, Stan Lee) — and from both perspectives, you can find something…
