Blue, Blue

Michael Atkinson writes regularly for the Village Voice and Sight and Sound, and teaches at Long Island University. His books include Exile Cinema (SUNY Press) and Blue Velvet (British Film Institute), which was reissued in a new edition in 2021.

Apr 25, 2023 — Steve McQueen’s monumental, five-film portrait of London’s West Indian community is a howl of endorsement for political resistance and a vivid indictment of institutional malaise.

Oct 18, 2019 — An intriguing paradox lies at the heart of Errol Morris’s body of work: while his films are driven by a relentless pursuit of knowledge and facts, they ultimately reveal cinema’s inability to capture a definitive version of reality. It’s this...

May 30, 2019 — It was more than three decades ago, in early 1986, that David Lynch arrived in Wilmington, North Carolina, to begin shooting his fourth feature, Blue Velvet. The surreal and emotionally overpowering neonoir that began to take shape there would go on to become...

May 21, 2018 — W hether she’s pushing herself to new heights on stage and screen or nurturing her passions as a painter and poet, Juliette Binoche is as creatively voracious now as she’s ever been. Her combination of strength and disarming vulnerability as...

Jun 27, 2017 — On what would have been his seventy-sixth birthday, we look back at the incandescent, richly cinematic reveries of one of the most acclaimed Polish filmmakers of his generation.

Mar 29, 2016 — Today, we’re celebrating the release on Blu-ray and DVD of Les Blank’s legendary Leon Russell music documentary A Poem Is a Naked Person. And while we’re on the topic of fascinating nonfiction filmmaking, we’re also taking a look at a...

Mar 18, 2016 — For the past thirty years, the British Film Institute has been honoring the best in contemporary and classic LGBT cinema from around the world, with its annual BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival. In celebration of the festival’s three-decade anniversary...

Mar 30, 2015 — A master of using the camera to draw truth from interview subjects, Errol Morris was unsurprisingly a candid and fascinating interview subject himself in new supplements we made for the Criterion releases of Gates of Heaven/Vernon, Florida and The Thin...

Feb 24, 2014 — A film of explosive passions, Abdellatif Kechiche’s coming-of-age triumph is about much more than just physical pleasure.