Michael Atkinson

So far on screen, Mexican narcoculture has generated mostly grim documentaries, but given the carnage and the proximity, you can easily imagine the movies coming from both sides of the border: the mezzobrow hand-wringers, the trigger-joy gangster trips, the based-on-true-story crusades. What we might not have seen......

The grand old dirty pope of midnight-movie voodoo and post-'60s turn-on, drop-out mythopoeia returns with a vengeance, in his autumnal phase and with, surprise, a personal look back at his own childhood. The Dance of Reality may be Alejandro Jodorowsky's best film, and certainly, in a filmography top-heavy with freak-show......

Ah, the Romanians — sometimes it seems that no one else is bothering to make movies for grown-ups anymore. Those of us with an abiding, New Wave–y interest in human warts and tragic truth-telling have known, since 2005's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, to look to the Carpathians for dependable......

Taken together, Ulrich Seidl's three Paradise films, each being released separately in the coming months, will be hard to beat this year for sheer art-house scald. Rivaling fellow Austrian miserablist Michael Haneke in pessimistic cred if not in fame or formal precision, Seidl has always been a dedicated voyeur of......

Reality, about an Italian fishmonger who wants to be on Big Brother, is the first great film about bad television. Rampaging through the otherwise arid desertscape of contemporary Italian cinema, Matteo Garrone doesn't want for ambition or walnuts — he may be the premier chronicler of Berlusconi-era Italian culture, and......

Objectively, the world needs another teen-romance-slash-virginity-loss dramedy like we need a hole in our collective movie heads. But Jonathan Kasdan's The First Time, against all odds, is something of a wonder, a palm-size ball of banter and irony and earnestness that never stops rolling and almost never misses the sweet......

The ubiquitous Duplass brothers stoke the furnace of sibling tension in this single-minded but fascinating discomfiture comedy, a kind of secret twin study of brothers locked in neurotic battle. In The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, Mark (Steve Zissis) is a chubby family man heading to his mother's house for his birthday; older brother......