Michael Atkinson

Nostalgia for the Light; Credit: PHOTO COURTESY OF ICARUS FILMS

Nostalgia for the Light review

Michael Atkinson
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,......

Wrecked

Michael Atkinson
WRECKED Yet another trapped-actor microthriller, this raw-nerved indie opens with shuddering organic close-ups too abstracted for comfort. Director Michael Greenspan eventually inches back to reveal cornea-traumatized Adrien Brody waking in a crushed car, deep in the mountains where there are no roads, his leg pinned under the dashboard and his......

White Irish Drinkers

Michael Atkinson
WHITE IRISH DRINKERS Shouldering a title that's redundant twice over, John Gray's Noo Yawker indie is a stubborn throwback to the Sundance-fueled, ethnic-neighborhood movie of the early '90s, when every film-school grad with a fresh head full of Mean Streets decided he would be the next Scorsese. Here it's "Brooklyn,......

I Saw the Devil

Michael Atkinson
I SAW THE DEVIL The pan-genre überhack of the new Korean zeitgeist, Kim Jee-woon has been deft in some arenas: 2003's A Tale of Two Sisters suggests a nightmare endured inside a suffocating velvet pillowcase, while 2008's breathless The Good, the Bad, the Weird pioneered the fourth-gear lo-mein Western with......

Zenith

Michael Atkinson
ZENITH "The film they don't want you to see," by "Anonymous," shouts the teaser, prefaced by warnings of legal threats and "illegal" images. Zenith comes off at first blush as merely a spurt of faux-transgression looking for rubberneckers. But it's actually a densely written, sparsely filmed dystopia, using the waste......
Eight thrillers by Claude Chabrol

Eight Films by the Late Claude Chabrol at LACMA

Michael Atkinson
The French New Wave is justly famous for many things, many different cultural geysers and tidal fluctuations and siroccos. But when we talk about the law firm of Godard Truffaut Rivette Chabrol Resnais Demy Varda Marker & Rohmer, we're usually talking about French spontaneity, romance, cinephilic experimentation, rock & roll,......
Bowery boys

Drunk History: On the Bowery

Michael Atkinson
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 with such fortune and care that there's no sign of decay after 50-plus years. Anyone who'd like near-firsthand familiarity with the Lower East Side of the postwar years need......

HEMINGWAY'S THE GARDEN OF EDEN

Michael Atkinson
Airily disregarding the Hemingway Unadaptability Principle, this quaintly racy version of Papa's most hated novel has a few bullets in its barrel: Dynasty scion Jack Huston, as the Hem avatar, is dull but physically a perfect fit, the Mediterranean tourist-porn is addictive, and the story, unique in this particular corpus,......

KURONEKO (BLACK CAT)

Michael Atkinson
GO  KURONEKO (BLACK CAT) Nippo-Gothic horror fables have a long tradition of protofeminist outrage — the metaphysical issue of the genre almost always revolves around rape and sexual vulnerability in a feudal landscape. Kaneto Shindô's Kuroneko (1968), finally making its Los Angeles premiere, may take the cake. The now-98-year-old Japanese......
The women of Marwencol

Marwencol: Life in Miniature

Michael Atkinson
Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do, Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol is something like a homegrown slice of Herzog oddness, complete with true-crime backfill and juicy metafictive upshot. It begins with context: In 2000, Mark Hogancamp, an upstate New York......