Michael Atkinson

A five-hour ordeal of spaghetti camp and flying fake blood, this program of vintage gialli from the "years of lead" era is surely the exhausting Thursday night out that'll scotch the rest of your weekend. Uber-hack Umberto Lenzi, master of every type of homegrown exploitation (he enjoyed several major phases,......

GO  PRINCE OF BROADWAY Permit-free, no-budget Manhattan indie Sean Baker returns with another palm-size street gadget, shot on the shoulder amid real crowds in sections of the city no one else bothers to film. Broadway is all neodoc super-realism all the time, investigating the exasperating routines of street hustler Lucky......

SWEETHEARTS OF THE PRISON RODEO A feel-good sports movie you can wrap your thighs around without blushing, Bradley Beesley's film opens the door into two arenas doc-watchers rarely frequent: state penitentiaries and rodeos, which have been merged in Oklahoma at a massive roundup performed entirely by cons. An annual tradition......

Akira Kurosawa's great autumnal Mount Fuji of a film, Ran (1985) shouldn't require an introduction — it landed with a popular ker-blam here in the otherwise fallow mid-'80s, and the hoopla was enough to make Kurosawa only the second Japanese filmmaker to ever be Oscar-nominated for Best Director (the other......

The further we get from it, the clearer it seems that the Age of the Waves — the '60s and '70s, roughly demarcated — was film culture's own belle epoque, glowing with post-teen hoochie-koo and experimental piss and vinegar practically wherever movie cameras churned. It still seems shocking, the crazy......