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 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 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 "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......

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,......

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......