Michael Atkinson

5 days ago | villagevoice.com | Michael Atkinson

It’s nearly impossible to watch Jia Zhang-ke’s new film, Caught by the Tides — a fractured, circumstantial portrait of the Chinese quotidian in the 21st century — without thinking about how he made it: retrospectively, so the film is from the start as much about Jia’s filmmaking arc as it is about his country.

1 week ago | villagevoice.com | Michael Atkinson

It’s a curious project to remake in the 2020s — Françoise Sagan’s slim scandal-smash 1954 novel, published when she was 18 and less than a decade after the end of WWII, pseudo-naively skewering as it does the haute Euro-bourgeoisie of the day from a narcissistic teenager’s perspective. Not to mention the big-budget 1958 Otto Preminger filmization, which gave beleaguered teen Jean Seberg her nakedest moment in American movies.

2 weeks ago | luxurylifestylemag.co.uk | Michael Atkinson

If asked to list the world’s most desirable postcodes, most would mention the likes of Monaco, the sovereign principality located along the Mediterranean Sea, which briefly interrupts the Côte d’Azur along the southern coast of France. It has long been a haven for the wealthy, steeped in glamour and famed for the likes of the casinos of Monte Carlo.

2 weeks ago | villagevoice.com | Michael Atkinson

A mood piece of otherworldly control and breath-holding severity, the new Georgian movie April is the kind of art film you wish for all year long, if you’ve otherwise spent too many cinema-hours waiting for contemporary filmmakers to grow up and stop fucking around. Every scene, every frame, means business, unpacking a dazzling arsenal of one-shot compositional iron maidens, pregnant tensions, and splats of mysterious New Weird subjectivity.

3 weeks ago | villagevoice.com | Michael Atkinson

One of world cinema’s most pungent brands, now in his seventh decade of filmmaking, David Cronenberg is beyond caring what we think of him, particularly if we decide, as many still do, to take him as merely a genre dynamo, the mad scientist inventor of “body horror.” (As if it hasn’t been over 40 years since the exploding heads of Scanners, and as if that reductive label by itself doesn’t obscure the man’s unique obsessions and the gnarly ways he’s metaphorized them from film to film.) Why...