Michael Atkinson

The gift William Monahan gets from the gods for winning his Departed-screenplay Oscar, this bristly Brit noir has a slick and dazzling chassis, from the Tarantino-esque opening credits to the Yardbirds songs to the torrent of East End profanity. The story, from Ken Bruen's book, is in the end a......

It seems like an inspired riff: a biopic not about a rock star's tumultuous and destined rise to fame and fortune, but about his school buddy's tumultuous and destined parallel journey into failure and obscurity. Always in the shadow of U2, Neil McCormick's self-annihilated non-career through various Irish bands in......

A mellow doc that seems all set to cash in on the "spirituality" market, Jennifer Fox's new film was actually in production for more than 20 years, beginning when Yeshi Silvano Namkhai was a half-Italian acne-victim teen just learning that he'd been dubbed the reincarnation of a famous Tibetan yogi......

Géla Babluani's 13 Tzameti (2005) is a superb, disconcerting, seismic French nightmare in a minor key, and so, of course, Babluani's Americanized remake (awaiting distribution for more than a year and a half) lumbers, stumbles, and blows all its secrets at the outset. Russian roulette standoff, stacks of dollars, then......

A Spanish Blair Witch DIY-er with a nutsy preemptive title, this trifle scoots and skitters along guilelessly, as if the mock-doc horror trope hasn't already been tourist-trampled to death. Here, a teenage brother-sister pair of web-show "paranormal investigators" take their equipment with them as their family vacations in a long-shuttered country house,......

Serotonin depletion is a common metabolic state in Mexican movies, but this unsettling indie, the Camera d'Or–winning debut of Michael Rowe, an Australian-born writer living in Mexico, follows the black dog to the cliff's edge. Essentially a study of brutal loneliness, the film is set entirely in one cheap apartment......

BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956) Barbara Rush plays opposite James Mason in Nicholas Ray's most delirious domestic drama, the tale of a schoolteacher (Mason) who is thrown by the tedium of suburban life into CinemaScope-sized megalomania. Cyril Hume and Richard Maibum's script could have made a topical, conservative melodrama about the......

Plenty of major documentary makers have dedicated themselves to being portraitists of their homeland, but no one has done it as relentlessly and righteously as Patricio Guzmán, for 35 years Chile's defiant verité John the Baptist and activist laureate. Born in 1941 in Santiago and a comfortable middle-classer, Guzmán was......

Chile's self-appointed one-man Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Patricio Guzmán has devoted the past four decades to chronicling the short-lived Allende administration and the Pinochet dark ages that followed, long after his countrymen wanted him to stop. At first blush, though, Nostalgia for the Light, his new documentary, detours toward astronomy,......