Michael Atkinson

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For 878 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 29% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 68% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 7.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Michael Atkinson's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 53
Highest review score: 100 Voyage to Italy (re-release)
Lowest review score: 0 Strippers
Score distribution:
878 movie reviews
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Much of what Faithless contains happens off-screen, told and retold as stories within stories, and so the actors typically work like oxen.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Im's movie approaches a seething, primitivist beauty that evokes Makhmalbaf and parallels the contrapuntal textual investigations of Resnais.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Barrett's trajectory is exciting, but his tribe is hilariously, dryly Irish about the experience.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Stylish, sullen, and a little predictable, Tell Me Something is the match of any American film in its quasi-genre, though you suspect that without a world market to target, it might've been even more anxious and intrepid.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Ostensibly factual, helplessly self-conscious -- Adanggaman is being touted as the continent's first film about slavery as it was experienced on African soil&#8212;where the victims and enslavers were both native peoples.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The filmmaking is fresh and unemphatic, and the acting is generally gripping.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Dynamic but preachy.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The acting, by a large cast of little-known young Brits chewing on South London accents like dog bones, is uniformly splendiferous.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    However defined, the movie's a moody piece of Wellesian chiaroscuro (shot by Max Greene, n&#233; Mutz Greenbaum) and an occasionally discomfiting underworld plunge, particularly when the mob-controlled wrestling milieu explodes into a kidney-punching donnybrook.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Dead flesh is a ruling motif, but Gleize's airy, observant personality makes even the graphic dismemberment of the bull, scored with flamenco stomps, buoyant and fascinating.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    May worship heedlessly at Duras's memory, but it's a testament to Moreau alone.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The storytelling is eloquent and genuine, but the Manns' unadventurous approach (compared to, for instance, last year's intimate road movie "Fighter") rarely hits emotional pay dirt.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Naturally, the worm turns again and again in this demi-Hitchcockian death trap, and Nakata knows how to shoot scenes of breath-holding paranoia: from a distance, simply, in real time. (We'll see how the inevitable remake, directed by Jonathan Glazer, measures up.)
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Hardly a scene goes by without a digitally fractured flashback or spasm of editing punctuation, rupturing the movie's otherwise carefully wrought sense of authenticity.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    May be an elaborate stunt, a bungee jump, but even so, it's forceful enough to leave a rare palpitating residue.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Nothing if not confrontational.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    How enlightening you find Damian Pettigrew's obsessive film depends on whether you're as adoring of Fellini as he was of himself; for the devoted, it's a gold mine.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    What emerges is not only an Underdog v. Simon Bar Sinister saga but a fascinating character study.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Heist is a neat, bouncy, minor-key crime procedural that shakes no rafters. Glorious, freestanding Mametisms are dropped into it like beef hunks into clear soup.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    All told, and in giant widescreen, it's only blood-red adolescent fun, but it blooms like Douglas Sirk with a Gatling gun compared to the teenage demographic's current fare. Matrix, schmatrix: This is the season's supreme party movie.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Jacques Perrin's Winged Migration is merely about birds, and though you learn less about the various species Perrin circled the globe to document than you might from an afternoon with Animal Planet, you become intensely chummy with the process and labor of flying.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Winterbottom was set on bare-bones realism, and so the scalding lyricism of ferocious terrain and sociopolitical absurdity seen in, say, "Kandahar" or "A Time for Drunken Horses," is never resourced.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    By way of a tragic left hook, Haroun's relaxed movie climaxes back where it began, on the devastated home ground. The journey, however pessimistic, is like a gentle handshake.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    A mild upkick in pacing and texture can be credited to director Alfonso Cuar&#243;n (more Little Princess than Y Tu Mam&#225;), who avoids Chris Columbus's mastodon-like setups and knows a bit more about whipping up atmospherics.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    As hokey as "Braveheart" and yet much more apocalyptic, Thanit Jitnukul's muscular jungle bloodbath outdoes Hollywood's recent efforts at combat ultra-realism.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Continuing the autobiographical torrent begun nearly 30 years ago, Bright Leaves is an utterly mundane miracle, a sampling of gentle insight and poetic retrospection quietly at odds with the exploitative culture around it.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The actors are all on target (particularly Penelope Wilton as Shaun's relentlessly cheery mum), and taken on its own shaky legs it's a wittier genre coda than "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein."
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Kurosawa strolls through his narrative with relaxed confidence, suggesting apocalyptic significances without assuring us that he has anything particular on his mind.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    If only this epic had enough substantial melodramatic hooks to hang this woman's beauty on; emotional traction is most often buried under acres of carefully coordinated vistas and CGI-hued flora.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    In time, Carrey's monkeyshines, Jude Law's silhouetted reappearances as Snicket, and the inevitable descent of Beverly Hills pathos blunt the movie's fastidious dark-carnival humor.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    It's a gut-twisting story handled, largely and predictably, with asbestos mitts.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Moody, pretentious, but potent.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Little in a Jaoui film is particularly original, but it's all perfectly convincing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Busting with clips from films Haskell Wexler shot and directed, the doc is a rare thing: an ingenuous portrait of a thoroughly Four-Square Artist, Assembled With Love And Rockets Inside A Family's Spite-Tainted Gates.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Slowly evolves into an oddly affecting mood piece.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Although it's thoroughly retooled, H.G. Wells's scenario doesn't allow for many soft landings, and the extreme respect for havoc on view quite properly keeps the Spielbergian cutesies to a minimum.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Saraband doesn't ask to be considered prime-cut Bergman, and it isn't, although its slightness may not matter to the art-film starving class.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Hitting the ground in his ultra-naturalistic mode, Assayas only uncages his star's formidable smile once or twice and never demands our empathy, making Clean a uniquely pungent portrait of dependent personalities and the strain they put on the social weave.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The Weeping Meadow shares the awed sense of solemn apocalypse with his (Angelopoulos) signature films, but it's lighter, more musical and folktale-ish.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    As the miners make clear, workers have no rights in this democracy that they don't fight like dogs for, and the film has no conclusion--the combat will always continue.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The most supremely odd American film of the year.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    This peculiar and sweet film--which lushly scores the silent tournaments with Henry Mancini and Tommy Dorsey--more or less leaves it at that, exploiting the poetic surreality of the overdressed Zulus in Pierre Cardin primping in the basements and barren fields of the Transvaal but resisting the urge to contextualize or explain it.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Arriaga's script (a prize at Cannes) has a lovely, fascinating shape to it, even if his crushing portrayal of white Americans--all of them, even Jones, suffering from a zombified affect and crippling shortsightedness--is somewhat counterset against his Mexicans, who are all morally balanced, if not always happy or nice.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    An informative if shrill primer on the last 35 years of Peruvian plight, the new doc State of Fear may only be effective as an educational tool for Americans, whose media have told them next to nothing about one of the Western Hemisphere's most horrifying killing fields.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The Fall of Fujimori is more-or less-than the flip side to last week's Film Forum Peru primer "State of Fear": It's a prismatic shudder, a maddening manifestation of historical ambivalence.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Although the film has a righteous heart, by focusing solely on government as showbiz, it's part of what it decries. Curry makes uproarious hay with the illegal shenanigans of incumbent mayor Sharpe James, but is that all there is? That said, Street Fight has enough cultural crosscurrents to fill out a novel.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Perhaps little more than an object lesson in the end, the movie's nevertheless a sobering day trip, more for its hints of a forgotten history of culture collision than its sensible but rote socioeconomic sympathies.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The hair may thin considerably under Brick's hat after a while, and Hammett redone remains Hammett half done, but while the plates are in the air, it's a spectacle of nerve.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Farnsworth brings a smidgen of scary energy to the social hellfire, and his newbie cast often out-act the pros.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    As the monks themselves threaten to nod off, the film's impressive narcotic effect enters the bloodstream-or so it may seem only for the unenlightened like me.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    An unassuming, unadventurous, but likable dramedy about dying and grief.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    For all of its well-schooled orthodoxy and visual splendor, Kekexili remains somewhat off-kilter--the characters' passionate wartime camaraderie and doomed sense of martyrdom aren't quite reflected in the facts of volunteer service and devotion to a balanced ecosystem.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Much more so than any movie actually about spiritual discipline, the new Chinese film Mongolian Ping Pong could be a meditational object-- if, perhaps, it wasn't a sneaky comedy and, to boot, one of the most breathtaking cinematic records of landscape and sky ever filmed.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The movie's shake-and-bake mix of "reality" and crumbling subjectivity is too deliberate to be about character--it is, rather, a game of movieness, a masquerade of Grand Guignol–as-psyche, virtually a parody of the surrealist's notion of consciousness bagged and tagged on celluloid.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    As much as Lady Vengeance spins around its implacable protagonist like a rabid dog on a rope, the film becomes in its last, galling act an unlikely but stunning ensemble piece.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    After 9-11, a sick, scandalized lame-duck mayor became a national hero for simply keeping his composure on TV. Keating's film is a comet out of the past, but it's focused, if only circumstantially, on the future.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The film survives on a thick diet of genuine acting moments...Probably no other actor (Hurt) standing today could've brought this much juice to such a potentially simplistic character.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Exhilaratingly anxious, Dominik Moll's new film Lemming charts familiar territory but does it with gravity and panache.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    This is not the can't-we-get-along Arab-Persian world we see in most liberal nonfiction films, but a broader and helplessly apocalyptic view of an entire region crazed with anger, frustration, and bloodlust into objectifying death as a weapon, a cause for cosmic glory, and little else.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Another doc sharing some of its cultural DNA, the spelling-bee melodrama Spellbound, had children, families, social conventions--Creadon's film has only words and people with a little time to waste.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The film's Endsville, when we reach it, is almost an anticlimax, thanks to the masterfully orchestrated ensemble acting and the countless dramatic mini-explosions unleashed along the way.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Chabrol sets us up, of course, which is half the fun, and the experience is a delight for lack of pomposity (his visual storytelling remains no-nonsense) as well as genre expertise.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Still, the textures of Refn's wallow in bad behavior are completely convincing, if the plot-stuff is a little familiar and if the overarching notion that, as Quentin Tarantino said somewhere, "gangsters have kitchens, too" seems by now valid but no longer terribly fresh.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Idlewild has a sober, loving respect for history and the old South, and thereby grants itself a measure of distinction.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Moving and ambitious in scale like nothing else in cinema, Michael Apted's Up films began in 1964 as a BBC news program exploring an old Jesuit maxim: "Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man."
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    So Goes the Nation has no new conspiracy theories, settling instead for a meticulous examination of the two political parties' hellbent voter-seduction strategies, from demographic outreach to slam ads.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    There's enough rosy-cheeked drama, triumph, and sacrifice for a ready-made Hollywood remake.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Nominated last year for a short-doc Oscar, the featurette is a lovely modern mini-myth, sarcastic and Beatrix Potter–y in turn.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Quietly and atmospherically touches on the Kiarostamian Uncertainty Principle, with Aljafari liberally corrupting his demi-documentary with scripted dialogue, rehearsals, and even digital effects.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Arbeláez indulges in occasional twinges of Hollywood "emphasis," but mostly the film glides on its matter-of-fact textures.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    There are trifling signs of freshmanship, but also a steady observant eye, and in the end Leap Year bears heartbreaking witness to hopeless depression, isolation, and the failure of sex as few movies ever have.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    If anything, Na's film is too much of a good thing, exceeding credibility too often (the punching-bag hero is far too lucky - good and bad - and absorbs a hilarious amount of punishment) in its pursuit of despairing violence. But that's the Korean way, and Na nails down the bottom feeder realism while slouching toward video-game hyperbole.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Bizarre, off-putting, and finally demanding of rubberneck respect, this fish-tank indie never leaves a rather lovely duplex apartment, occupied by an unemployed Everyman (Brendan Fletcher) and his roommate, Jimmy (director Matt D'Elia).
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Uncompromising in its way, the film's portrait of codependent compulsion is so organically conceived, you start to smell the sulfur of traumatized childhood, no exposition needed.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    In the end, once we realize the title doesn't refer to these bantams' weight class but to their strength of heart, or something, the film feels blandly respectful and, oddly enough, apolitical.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Earnest and blessed with immediate visual textures, Aviad's film is nevertheless much more a matter of feelings - shared or suppressed and then shared - than of story.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Thick with reenactments and cute cutaways, the movie evolves into a cultural inquisition, following this stranger through the strange land of bad-news America, where the truth is still waiting to be exhumed.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The historical road less traveled - shot in re-enactments that are obviously familiar with the terrain - is beguiling enough.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    In the end, we glimpse footage of the real Augiéras, but by then, the film wanders off into its own set of suggested Cagean possibilities, and what you get feels closer to a fable-essay about the meaning of art than a narrative. Sweet stuff.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    There's no missing Kellstein's unstated horror during the fight sequences, which traffic in queasy blood sport absurdity that overshadows "Battle Royale" and "The Hunger Games," because the cherubs are eight and because it's all too real.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    By now, grandchildren are ever-present, and stasis has set in. Apted's entire project is awesome in scale but subject to inevitable diminishing returns.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    It's hard to be certain whether the film's placidity is an ironic gag, but the modesty at work turns out to be pretty likable, as strange as that sounds.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    One of the year's thorniest releases.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Seidl's visual style -- bitter-comic three-walled tableaux -- makes the scenario's tension between desire and reality almost unbearable, but Melanie offers hope by simple virtue of her youth, her unformed romantic folly, and her guileless courage.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Its realism is patient and inclusive.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Overbay's palette is carefully lyrical, at a benumbed Martha Marcy May Marlene pitch, he pays attention to the verdant landscape and keeps his cast at a pensive and watchful low boil.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The film's blast of self-mocking overkill can be charming.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    This is not a movie, really, but a back-rub and a cup of tea for Tsai purists, for whom the filmmaker's company, behind or in front of the camera, is all that's required.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    You don't watch prolific doc-master Wang Bing's new film about a Chinese mental hospital so much as get imprisoned within it, pacing its dingy corridors and rooms like a zoo animal.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The film is a vehicle for Applebroog-appreciation, daughterly and otherwise.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Ogalla makes it happen: Bedroom-eyed and shaggy, looking every inch like a reincarnation of dead-too-soon ‘70s French star Patrick Dewaere but without the haywire intensity, he's an amiable spectacle.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Though Lee's movie is dripping with action and beautiful details, it's aimless and, eventually, tedious.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    For audiences new to this type of moon-mad magical realism and unembarrassed romanticism, Orfeu can spellbind.
    • Mr. Showbiz
    • 24 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Filthy fun, if not much more.
    • Mr. Showbiz
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    In terms of raw wit and fearless satire, the South Park kids put Mike Myers and Adam Sandler to shame.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 68 Michael Atkinson
    A brooding, stunningly realistic portrait of familial self-destruction that raises far more questions than it can possibly answer.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 67 Michael Atkinson
    A fresh and beautifully timed, if slight, romantic comedy.

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