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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    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Atkinson
    Voyage to Italy (re-release)
    Voyage to Italy is close to watching actual strangers suffer loneliness despite being together. It can leave an aching bruise, but only if you're paying attention.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Atkinson
    The Conformist
    Bertolucci's masterpiece--made when he was all of 29--will be the most revelatory experience a fortunate pilgrim will have in a theater this year is a foregone conclusion.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 90 Michael Atkinson
    Fanny and Alexander (re-release)
    Bergman locates a generosity and élan that make F&A feel like his youngest film.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Atkinson
    Intolerance
    It is at least one of cinema’s great vexations, an astonishing and Herculean visual achievement cursed in various amplitudes by auteurism, guilt, memories of bigotry, evolving norms, and the power of cinema itself.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Atkinson
    The Night of the Hunter
    Laughton understood Agee's proximity to Grimm vaudeville, and fashioned the most intensely expressionistic movie of its day.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Atkinson
    Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
    The hard-charging originality of the screenplay—the equivalent of turning "The Hot Zone" into a Farrelly comedy—suggests a deficient legacy of credit to Terry Southern's corner.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Atkinson
    The Battle of Algiers
    A prototype of news-footage realism, the film makes shrewd use of handheld sloppiness, misjudged focus, overexposure, and you-are-there camera upset; the payoff is the scent of authentic panic.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Michael Atkinson
    The Producers
    However familiar, it delivers like a shorted slot machine.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Michael Atkinson
    La Dolce Vita
    In one movie, at least, the ethical baseline (heisted, you could argue, from "Sweet Smell of Success") gave Fellini's roaming, cluttered mise-en-scène a chilling gravity he could never genuinely locate again.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Atkinson
    Taxi Driver
    You either love it or you love it; in any case, Martin Scorsese's history-making scald is truly a phenomenon from another day and age.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 94 Michael Atkinson
    Yi Yi
    The one movie so far this year that every filmgoer should see, if only to get a big dose of what we've been missing from Hollywood.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Michael Atkinson
    Sunset Boulevard
    What's not recognized enough is the indelible, self-sickened performance of William Holden as Desmond's boy-toy/hired hack.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Atkinson
    Apocalypse Now
    No other movie released this year is as much of a filmgoing necessity as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux.
    • Mr. Showbiz
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Atkinson
    Days of Heaven
    It seems almost incontestably...the most gorgeously photographed film ever made. [23 March 1999]
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Michael Atkinson
    Hard to Be a God
    Textually, the setting's brutalist conflation between the far future and the distant past makes the film timeless, an elusive fable told with the viscous immediacy of a life on the diseased edge of civilization.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Michael Atkinson
    Close-Up
    Like nearly every other Kiarostami film, Close-Up takes questions about movies and makes them feel like questions of life and death.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Atkinson
    Umberto D (re-release)
    It's too bad that the film is sporadically crude (a moment of suicidal angst is illustrated with a shove-zoom to the pavement), prone to mega-Italian extroversion, and far too in love with stupid pet tricks.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Michael Atkinson
    Secrets & Lies
    The ride is remarkable.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Atkinson
    Almayer's Folly
    One of the year's most hypnotic and fascinating films.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 30 Michael Atkinson
    Baran
    Remains simplistic and gimmicky in the context of Iranian cinema.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Atkinson
    Alphaville
    Iconic in its very grain, the film toggles effortlessly between toast-dry farce and vogueing postwar hipitude, and like the balletic swimmers performing mid-pool state executions, it's a thing of insensible beauty.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    Repulsion (re-release)
    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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 66 Michael Atkinson
    Beau Travail
    The characters are barely characters, the story barely a story, and the elliptical filmmaking style that so besots Denis' many fans could drive you to drink.
    • Mr. Showbiz
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Michael Atkinson
    Nostalgia for the Light
    Often stark and ravishing, Nostalgia for the Light is most moving as a manifestation of the filmmaker's stubborn righteousness.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Michael Atkinson
    The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
    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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 81 Michael Atkinson
    Topsy-Turvy
    Topsy-Turvy is flawless, borne along by a savagely witty screenplay that Leigh directs like the gears of a clock.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 89 Michael Atkinson
    Being John Malkovich
    An ingenious, incredibly entertaining, Rorschach-blot meta-comedy based on a spec script (by first-timer Charlie Kaufman) that is completely unlike anything anyone has ever seen before.
    • Mr. Showbiz
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Michael Atkinson
    The Truman Show
    The Truman Show is one of the films for which the '90s will be remembered, and it is not to be missed.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Michael Atkinson
    The Blue Angel
    Dietrich is the movie's primary cannon: Her amused eyes, open face, and relaxed sensuality monopolize our sympathies.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Michael Atkinson
    Capturing the Friedmans
    I've seen only a few films in my lifetime that so potently express the golden hopes of childhood and parenthood, as well as the inevitable decimation of that hopefulness -- that forward-looking bliss -- at the hands of catastrophe, or merely age, spite, and exhaustion. Or, as for the Friedmans, all of the above.
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