Michael Atkinson

The story moves to a massive cache of early 20th-century films uncovered in the 1970s in Dawson City, Canada, which allows Morrison to launch into a leisurely portrait of the Yukon Gold Rush, Dawson City’s origins and growth (where, among a great many others, Fredick Trump began his fortune, with a brothel), the industrialization of mining, World War I, the interwar combat between labor and government, and so on....

With movie-history viewing choices spawning like mold in a damp room, we can easily see the things we didn't even know we'd never seen. For me that includes Takashi Miike's Black Society Trilogy (Arrow Video), a trio of quick, down-and-dirty crime-gang pulp rockets (1995-99) that established Miike as Japan's fin-de-siècle......

We should be tired of wondering why Scandinavians are so fascinated with runaway crime — it's obviously because they have so little of it. Set in Chicago or Bangkok or Juarez, vicious bloodletting might play like wallpaper, but it comes off as almost surreal, and a little gimmicky, when framed......

A dry-rubbed lark from the often harrowing ultra-realist territories of the Romanian New Wave, The Treasure is about almost nothing — a shaggy-dog daydream as flyaway as its protagonists' thoughts of instant wealth. Director Corneliu Porumboiu, whose 2006 12:08 East of Bucharest may still be the movement's funniest film, reportedly......

In the olden days, what month it was never mattered to movies. But today the late winter months are well known as a weedy boneyard of mouth-breathing Hollywood castoffs, and we explore it at the cost of our patience, time, shekels and optimism. For the love of everything holy, stay......