Michael Atkinson

Reality Is the First Great Film About Bad TV

Michael Atkinson
Reality, about an Italian fishmonger who wants to be on Big Brother, is the first great film about bad television. Rampaging through the otherwise arid desertscape of contemporary Italian cinema, Matteo Garrone doesn't want for ambition or walnuts — he may be the premier chronicler of Berlusconi-era Italian culture, and......

The First Time Review: Teen Love Done Right

Michael Atkinson
Objectively, the world needs another teen-romance-slash-virginity-loss dramedy like we need a hole in our collective movie heads. But Jonathan Kasdan's The First Time, against all odds, is something of a wonder, a palm-size ball of banter and irony and earnestness that never stops rolling and almost never misses the sweet......
Jeremy Renner in The Bourne Legacy; Credit: PHOTO BY MARY CYBULSKI

Bourne Legacy Review: Sequel Suffers From Damonlessness

Michael Atkinson
The Bourne films have more than just overstayed their welcome and outlasted the Ludlum books ― they’ve been Van Halenized, with an abrupt change of frontman and a resulting dip in personality. The only big-ass popcorn franchise of the past decade to have not been spawned on computers, the series......
Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai

Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai Might Be Takashi Miike's Best Film Yet

Michael Atkinson
The transformation might be complete: The crap-and-gore, genre-mincing Tasmanian devil of Asian pulp psychosis Takashi Miike we’ve come to know and, well, kinda semi-love since 1999's Audition seems now to have finished evolving into a tasteful, even resonant art house master. It has only taken him 50 movies or so......

Do-Deca-Pentathlon Review

Michael Atkinson
The ubiquitous Duplass brothers stoke the furnace of sibling tension in this single-minded but fascinating discomfiture comedy, a kind of secret twin study of brothers locked in neurotic battle. In The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, Mark (Steve Zissis) is a chubby family man heading to his mother's house for his birthday; older brother......
Kiss Me Deadly; Credit: PHOTO COURTESY OF LACMA

California Noir

Michael Atkinson
Will we ever tire of noir? Unlikely — the genre's organic expression of its time and place (postwar America, in all of its secret doubt and existential dread) makes the films deathlessly fascinating and vitally true. Noirs, still written about and retro-screened and DVD'd more than any other Hollywood-product genre,......
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

Alice in Wonderland on Film Through the Ages, at LACMA

Michael Atkinson
It's such a toxic-potent paradigm it's hard to believe Lewis Carroll came up with it first — female puberty as a mud-wrestle with the irrational, a maiden's journey into a quasi-adult sphere drunk on its own rules and power but actually fucking nuts. It's an elemental conflict that's as political......
Oscar nominee In Darkness

Oscar Nominee In Darkness Reviewed

Michael Atkinson
Holocaust culture has proven to be essentially infinite: Almost 70 years since the end of World War II, untold stories of decimation and survival are still hitting the mainstream. Agnieszka Holland's new film, In Darkness, opens a scab perhaps only familiar to Holocaust Museum devotees — the tale of a......
Rampling's Look

Charlotte Rampling: The Look Review

Michael Atkinson
"A self-portrait through others," as it's subtitled, this conversational hall of mirrors never takes its microscope off 65-year-old actress Charlotte Rampling, ruminating freely on beauty, acting, sensuality, being photographed and "what's behind the eyes." Less famed as a thespian over the decades than as an icy '60s-'70s icon, jet-set provocateur......
The Yellow Sea

The Yellow Sea Review

Michael Atkinson
Treating crime drama like a death cage tournament, rousing, dark-hearted Korean epic The Yellow Sea doesn't know quite when to stop once it begins, which is with an ethnically Korean Chinese cabbie (Ha Jung-woo) traveling to South Korea to find his errant wife and pay off her debt by killing......