Michael Atkinson

A canny portrait of marital catastrophe that's equal measures Raymond Carver bitter quietude and late Ingmar Bergman striptease, Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure surprised grown-up moviegoers, starved for mature meat ages after such psychodramatic pressure cookers were common in arthouse theaters. But it wasn't a terrible stunner for Swedes and dedicated......

Call it Stone Age materialism, but I still think movies are worth owning in physical forms you can hold, shelve and collect, and therefore worth giving as gifts. Fuck the Cloud — who knows when Hulu will be sold to Google, or when Netflix will decide to narrow its catalog......

What's fascinating, new and neglected across all major video platforms. Among other things, cinema has always been a ready-made self-eulogizer — Hollywood was making two-reeler silent comedies about the craft of moviemaking before the viewing public even knew what it entailed, and documentaries about famous and forgotten threads of film......

So far on screen, Mexican narcoculture has generated mostly grim documentaries, but given the carnage and the proximity, you can easily imagine the movies coming from both sides of the border: the mezzobrow hand-wringers, the trigger-joy gangster trips, the based-on-true-story crusades. What we might not have seen......

The grand old dirty pope of midnight-movie voodoo and post-'60s turn-on, drop-out mythopoeia returns with a vengeance, in his autumnal phase and with, surprise, a personal look back at his own childhood. The Dance of Reality may be Alejandro Jodorowsky's best film, and certainly, in a filmography top-heavy with freak-show......

Ah, the Romanians — sometimes it seems that no one else is bothering to make movies for grown-ups anymore. Those of us with an abiding, New Wave–y interest in human warts and tragic truth-telling have known, since 2005's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, to look to the Carpathians for dependable......

Taken together, Ulrich Seidl's three Paradise films, each being released separately in the coming months, will be hard to beat this year for sheer art-house scald. Rivaling fellow Austrian miserablist Michael Haneke in pessimistic cred if not in fame or formal precision, Seidl has always been a dedicated voyeur of......