Michael Atkinson

Fictional dystopias, as opposed to the real one we live in, are always just a few degrees away from being satire — every strand of sci-fi sociopolitical hyperbo...

Some high-end, auteur-driven, 21st-century movies are streamlined theme rockets, carefully built for power, meaning, and minimal drag coefficient, while others ...

Based on an actual the-money’s-still-out-there 2008 heist, the new Danish thumper The Quiet Ones begins with a killer set-piece: an attack on a bank courier van...

A sprightly, bloody, black-humored B-movie about fuckbots, the new film Companion is too slick and glib for its own good, but should that matter? It might take ...

So, when is a movie not really a movie, and a documentary hardly a documentary, and a pandemic splooge of recorded online gameplay not gameplay at all but somet...

So, let’s be consumer-forward: Year-end lists aren’t about critics planting their flags in the media moment’s lunar surface and declaring ownership of the Zeitg...

 Happy holidays! to a certain breed of neo-Goth, black-nail-polish fan brat, and, as a matter of fact, to a certain stripe of legacy “monster culture” gray pant...

You could say that Brady Corbet’s sprawling, top-heavy, high-minded film The Brutalist is an ambitious, personal, all-American epic like they simply don’t make ...

John Waters once famously suggested that if you go home with someone and they don’t own any books, you shouldn’t fuck them. I’d go one step further: Shun the ho...

It’s a dialectic, pressure in, pressure out: Autocratic societies will almost by definition spawn rebellious responses, and so in a sense you could say that the...