For 203 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 38% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 60% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4.5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Michael Atkinson's Scores

  • Movies
Average review score: 55
Highest review score:
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 81 out of 203
  2. Negative: 46 out of 203
203 movie reviews
    • Metascore: 86
    • Michael Atkinson 100
    Ozon -- has finally hit a home run, and Rampling is his most remarkable RBI.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Michael Atkinson 100
    One of the year's best films, and certainly its most challenging so far: At more than three hours, watching it is less like consuming entertainment and more like living.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Michael Atkinson 100
    Naturalistic, gritty, and unrelenting.
    • Metascore: 90
    • Michael Atkinson 100
    No other movie released this year is as much of a filmgoing necessity as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Michael Atkinson 100
    Amid the chaos of this marvelous, uncategorizable film squirms one of the year's best performances.
    • Metascore: 92
    • Michael Atkinson 94
    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.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Michael Atkinson 93
    So breathtakingly textural, so empathic in its images, that it transcends its context and achieves timelessness.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Michael Atkinson 93
    The best film we'll see this year.
    • Metascore: 70
    • Michael Atkinson 92
    Normal ideas of truth, illusion, and representation are sent into the meat grinder, and the result is consistently disarming and beautiful.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Michael Atkinson 91
    For the discouraged filmgoer, Erice's tone poem will be a ray of hope itself.
    • Metascore: 91
    • Michael Atkinson 90
    The ride is remarkable.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Michael Atkinson 90
    Her (Cheung) gorgeously sad face and slow, lithe frame are the movie's hammer and chisel. One shot of her walking away from a rented room down a hallway is, all by itself, twice the movie of anything else currently in theaters.
    • Metascore: 90
    • Michael Atkinson 90
    The Truman Show is one of the films for which the '90s will be remembered, and it is not to be missed.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Michael Atkinson 90
    It might be the scariest movie ever made.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Michael Atkinson 90
    This is what Woody Allen movies might be like if they were not ruled by narcissism, pretentious point-scoring, cheap observations, and Woody's peculiar speech patterns.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Michael Atkinson 90
    Easily the best directorial debut of the year, and possibly the most mature and haunting film to ever come out of Scotland, Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher is a throat-catching masterpiece of lyricism, observation, and stone-cold realism.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Michael Atkinson 89
    Maddin's movie is, frame for frame, the densest and most spectacular (albeit cardboard-cheap) film playing anywhere.
    • Metascore: 61
    • Michael Atkinson 89
    Easily the year's most trying, tormented, and thrilling movie ordeal.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Michael Atkinson 89
    Suzhou River might be more pulpy than profound, but it still sings its old song better than we've heard in years.
    • Metascore: 90
    • Michael Atkinson 89
    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.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Michael Atkinson 87
    Lusts for a feel-good ending the material doesn't comfortably provide. One can't help wondering how dismal Jerry and Dorothy's life together will be after the credits roll.
    • Metascore: 72
    • Michael Atkinson 86
    A superb, wise, and witty Taiwanese film about being single and what to do about it.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Michael Atkinson 84
    Dumont's movie has virtually nothing wrong with it -- aside from the fact that it drives people crazy. Take the leap, but expect no answers. Just like life, as they say.
    • Metascore: 71
    • Michael Atkinson 84
    Might be the most original film of the year.
    • Metascore: 73
    • Michael Atkinson 84
    An explosive experience...and you have to love the movie's rabid energy and lust.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Michael Atkinson 81
    Lacks scope and doesn't resonate grandly as a portrait of an American underbelly like Morris' earlier works do. But it still packs a wallop.
    • Metascore: 65
    • Michael Atkinson 81
    Easily the best millennial movie, Don McKellar's Last Night is also the only one to use the idea of apocalyptic end-time as a vehicle to explore the absurdity of human desire.
    • Metascore: 90
    • Michael Atkinson 81
    Topsy-Turvy is flawless, borne along by a savagely witty screenplay that Leigh directs like the gears of a clock.