Michael Atkinson

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Mr. Showbiz, Time Out, Village Voice
For 888 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 30% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 67% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 11.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Michael Atkinson's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 54
Highest review score: 100 Under the Sand
Lowest review score: 0 Crush
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 328 out of 888
  2. Mixed: 354 out of 888
  3. Negative: 206 out of 888
888 movie reviews
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    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo
    There's enough rosy-cheeked drama, triumph, and sacrifice for a ready-made Hollywood remake.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Why Don't You Play in Hell?
    The film's blast of self-mocking overkill can be charming.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Hollow Man
    Filthy fun, if not much more.
    • Mr. Showbiz
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The Imposter
    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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Heist
    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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Clean
    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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    On My Way
    Its realism is patient and inclusive.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The Apostate
    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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Mountain Patrol
    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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
    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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Shaun of the Dead
    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."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Brick
    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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The Double Steps
    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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Our Father
    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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Lady Vengeance
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The King
    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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    A mild upkick in pacing and texture can be credited to director Alfonso Cuarón (more Little Princess than Y Tu Mamá), who avoids Chris Columbus's mastodon-like setups and knows a bit more about whipping up atmospherics.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Chunhyangdyun
    Im's movie approaches a seething, primitivist beauty that evokes Makhmalbaf and parallels the contrapuntal textual investigations of Resnais.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Adanggaman
    Ostensibly factual, helplessly self-conscious -- Adanggaman is being touted as the continent's first film about slavery as it was experienced on African soil—where the victims and enslavers were both native peoples.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    49 Up
    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."
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Harlan County U.S.A. (re-release)
    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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Rabbit à la Berlin
    Nominated last year for a short-doc Oscar, the featurette is a lovely modern mini-myth, sarcastic and Beatrix Potter–y in turn.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    My Summer of Love
    Slowly evolves into an oddly affecting mood piece.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Bang Rajan
    As hokey as "Braveheart" and yet much more apocalyptic, Thanit Jitnukul's muscular jungle bloodbath outdoes Hollywood's recent efforts at combat ultra-realism.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Wordplay
    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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Tell Them Who You Are
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The Manzanar Fishing Club
    The historical road less traveled - shot in re-enactments that are obviously familiar with the terrain - is beguiling enough.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Narc
    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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The Swenkas
    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.
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