Mick LaSalle

It’s a good film, very unlike most “disease of the week” pictures, in that it’s often quite funny, and it tells a fascinating story about something that remains mysterious to most people.

Instead of settling for a tour de force from McKellen, Soderbergh goes for something better — a fascinating give and take from start to finish.

Jonah Hill has directed and co-written an impressive little movie with “Outcome.” It could be called a Hollywood satire, but what’s striking about it — and audacious and unexpected — is that it’s dramatic and heartfelt. Here and there, it even comes close to being sentimental.

Cast adrift in this aimless movie, Ahmed seems lost. His performance is one in an unfortunate tradition of weepy Hamlets, and his problems are compounded by the fact that his weepiness is unconvincing. Each time he teared up while delivering a soliloquy, I felt that he was trying to sell me a used car.

Like “It Ends with Us,” which was also based on a Colleen Hoover novel, “Reminders of Him” is a movie whose willingness to be deeply unpleasant saves it from becoming a soap opera.

The Optimist could be described as a Holocaust drama, but it approaches that history in an unexpected way.

It’s a sneaky little movie about what people are really like, and it’s impressive.

I’ve been fascinated by McCartney for decades, and “Man on the Run” made me feel like I was getting closer to understanding the real guy.

Fennell (“Promising Young Woman,” “Saltburn”) is a skilled filmmaker who can put over her ideas. The problem is that all her ideas here are bad — self-defeating, enervating and, in several places, unintentionally hilarious.

In America, it might be called a mess, and at times this movie sags. But overall, there’s something about it that holds interest. “A Private Life” is an odd ramble that eventually arrives somewhere.

You can love or hate “The Chronology of Water,” but if you don’t come away from it marveling at the brilliance of Poots’s performance, you just weren’t paying attention.

If “Dead Man’s Wire” has a weakness it’s that it doesn’t create an intense desire to find out how it all turns out. It compensates with dark humor and with a central performance by Skarsgård that’s fascinating.

The inescapable, undeniable weakness of Father Mother Sister Brother is that, while its first part is thoroughly satisfying, its second part is just OK, and its third part is close to a waste of time.

At its best, it captures the last-days-of-Pompei feeling that was in the air at the time — a mix of frenetic celebration, paranoia and despair. But alas, the documentary soon derails into bogus history, specious arguments and a self-blinding variety of political bias.

Fortunately, the last 30 to 40 minutes of “The Housemaid” are so propulsive and unexpected that it makes up for what the middle lacks.

As Ella, Mackey shows that she can carry a movie and remain sympathetic, despite a script that sometimes works against her.

Needless to say, the actors are better than the material.

It all becomes silly, monotonous and boring. Maybe not as monotonous as being cast out into void, but boring enough to put you to sleep.

The movie’s biggest asset, aside from Buckley, is the set design. To look at the physical interiors of the houses is like stepping inside a Vermeer painting. Care was taken to provide “Hamnet” with the most realistic and detailed of settings.

Jay Kelly is Baumbach’s best film and, from an artistic standpoint, his first complete success.

What truly propels the film is the growing realization, through both the script and Sweeney’s performance, that Christy isn’t an ordinary person blessed with an extraordinary gift. Rather, she’s an extraordinary person whose very life force is awe-inspiring.

Not enough can be said for how strong [Crowe] is in this film, and how welcome it is every time he appears on screen. He seems able to read people. He also seems German, complete with German gestures.

The quiet intensity of “Blue Moon” is at times agonizing. Any more would have been too much.

A House of Dynamite is an attempt to make a white-knuckle thriller, but there’s very little suspense to it. We have a pretty good idea of how it’s all going to end even before the first segment is over. And after that, we really know it, as we’re forced to watch the same events play out two more times.

Daniel Day-Lewis has emerged from retirement to do something he has never done before — make a truly horrible movie.

The only weakness of the movie is that, because it’s a true story, it can’t rearrange the order of events for maximum drama. Thus, what is essentially the climax of the film comes about three quarters in, and the rest of it, while never less than interesting, feels like falling action. The good news is that Sweeney and Kirby get their best scenes, respectively, in this last section of the movie.

Though Hauser and Sweeney can’t exactly save the movie, they keep it from derailing.

Night Always Comes isn’t an especially ambitious movie, but it’s simple where it needs to be simple, and it’s complex when complexity is called for.

Neeson is a delight and seems to be having as much fun as the audience. But the surprise here is Anderson, who was sad and plaintive in “The Last Showgirl” and now reveals herself a skilled and self-aware comedienne. Anderson is having a moment right now, and I’d like to see it continue.

Oh, Hi! is that rare case, a movie that’s engaging and interesting moment by moment, but everything else is wrong with it.

While the original was serious, Old Guard 2 is merely forlorn. Its story holds little interest and, to make matters worse, it doesn’t even end. Instead, it stops mid-story, promising a sequel that feels less like a promise than a threat.

In 1925, Charlie Chaplin released "The Gold Rush," his best film to date and one of the best he would ever make - or anyone would ever make.

Sweeney gives the movie its extra spark, its sense of occasion.

Despite moments of unintentional humor, “The Ritual” has an appealing gravity about it, which probably derives from its adherence to the historical record.

As suspense thrillers go, “Dangerous Animals” is as uncompromising as it gets. It doesn’t aspire to much, but it’s well-acted and well-written, looks great and full of surprises.

The movie goes to Vienna, to Egypt and to Italy and was probably more fun to make than watch.

Clown in a Cornfield will never be ranked among the classics of our time, but there are aspects of it that are worthy of admiration.

Hartnett is naturally engaging, and one can see why, with the movie plummeting to earth, the filmmakers might decide to pull the humor ripcord. But here it smells of desperation.

There’s no way to call Havoc a good movie, but as bad movies go, this is a good one. Depending on your mood, its variety of craziness could be what you’re looking for.

It’s a wail of grief, an expression of love, a testament to the body. Cronenberg puts it all on the line here, and he gets his actors to put it all on the line with him. If you don’t feel its visceral charge, you’re not paying attention.

Drop is the kind of film that separates the real movie lover from the conditional movie lover. It is manipulative, fundamentally ridiculous, obvious, far-fetched, gut-level in its appeal and irresistible. As such, it embodies the true soul of movies.

Unfortunately, the thin story feels terribly stretched and often doesn’t make sense.

When one performance in a movie is exceptional, you can credit the actor. But when everyone is great, it has to have at least something to do with the director. That’s the case with “Bob Trevino Like It,” which has three standout performances.

In retrospect, Levinson might secretly wonder if the bizarre casting was the right move after all. But at least he got strong performances from his lead actor, and he took a good script by Pileggi (“Goodfellas”) and made a good movie out of it. You can’t ask for much more than that.

Cleaner is a good-not-great thriller in the “Die Hard” mold that gets an extra lift from Campbell’s skillful direction and from Ridley, who is slowly but surely showing herself to be a performer of wide range and appeal.

The key to any Amy Schumer comedy is how often she gets to play self-delusion, embarrassment, fear and rage. As long as the emotions, terrors and humiliations are big, she’s funny, and her latest, “Kinda Pregnant,” gives her lots of opportunities to be funny.

The emotion the Zucheros are trying to express and illustrate here is a deep, fathomless, infinite loneliness, and here and there, but more than once or twice, they hit their target.

Back in Action is no comedy classic, but it’s a better than average excuse for getting back on the Cameron Diaz train.

Still, as Dylan biopics go, this is probably the best imaginable.

Mary is a fictionalized and heavily dramatized account of the life of the Virgin Mary, but the movie’s great and only pleasure is in watching Anthony Hopkins play King Herod as a homicidal maniac.

September 5 succeeds as a tense and involving film, at least partly because it makes the case that the tragedy, despite all its other consequences and ramifications, marked a signal moment in news broadcasting. It was the first time that a hostage drama played out on live television.

Maria, despite being occasionally slow, is a weird, good movie.

Gladiator II coasts: never good, never terrible, always a little disappointing, with speeches that fall flat and gladiator battles that are like watching the World Series when your team isn’t in it.

Either “Nightbitch” shouldn’t have been made or its premise should have been transformed and built upon.

With “A Real Pain,” Jesse Eisenberg has invented a new genre we can call “the Kieran Culkin movie.”

The film is a showcase for a talented ensemble of Black actors, not the least of whom is Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Doaker, an older, mellow wise man.

You’d have to be passionately interested in the details of an Irish small town not to find “Small Things Like These” something of a slog.

Juror #2 is very much the work of an engaged, sensitive director — a series of tight, focused scenes informed by strong performances. There’s something classical about it, old-fashioned in the best way, like a 1974 Coupe de Ville or a 1962 Buick Electra. It’s a smooth, solid ride.

The movie tries to make up for its lack of propulsion through various means, with mixed results.

In “My Name is Alfred Hitchcock,” Cousins gives us a new way of looking at Hitchcock, as a filmmaker with an evocative visual world, and a case could be made that it would be easier for viewers to appreciate that aspect of Hitchcock on a second or third viewing.

Conclave is a fascinating drama about the personal and political machinations involved in the selection of a new pope. If a bunch of cardinals filling out multiple ballots over the course of several days doesn’t exactly sound riveting to you, prepare for a surprise.

If you’re talking about “Venom: The Last Dance,” you know you’re talking about something unimportant. If you’re writing about it, you know you’re doing something embarrassing. But what about the people who made this movie? What level of awareness do they have?

Baker is concerned with people who are broke and on the outside (“The Florida Project,” “Red Rocket”), and while there are aspects of “Anora” that make us aware of the distance between people born with everything and those born with nothing, he doesn’t let politics or economics dwarf his characters.

From moment to moment, Rumours is almost entertaining. But for it to work, you pretty much have to root for it. The movie invites you not to enjoy it so much as to appreciate the effort.

I can’t imagine who would want to make a movie like this, much less who would want to watch this. It says nothing real about life or death, and it’s not as though it’s telling us something we don’t already know.

The Apprentice is an anti-Trump movie, depicting his early career as a real estate developer in New York City, but it treats Donald Trump with a modicum of sympathy.

If you want to see great acting that’s unadorned, not fancy, and very much in the style of 2024, see Plaza in the climactic scene from “My Old Ass.” You will walk out of this film different than when you walked in, and a little bit better for the experience.

The Substance gets more wonderfully appalling as it goes along, but it’s impressive from its first moments, and it never lets up.

It’s a pretty good movie that automatically goes up one full notch because of a single great scene, which is one more than most movies have.

War Game is one of the more timely and disturbing movies of recent months.

It’s a somber, serious experience that won’t appeal to everybody, but it’s quite smart and will keep you guessing until its last seconds.

What we’re left with is a movie that has good moments for all the actors, but which, through a series of tonal imprecisions, ends up seeming sour and pointless.

They can’t make “The Union” better than a genre movie, but they can make it better than a decent genre movie. Also, considering the fact that Berry is one of the most misused and underused major stars of the last two decades, any role that shows her screen personality to good advantage is probably worth a look.

My Penguin Friend is what you’d expect from an animal picture, except that it’s better — lifted by a smart script, sensitive direction and a truly beautiful performance by Jean Reno.

The foundational mistake came when someone said, “Hey, let’s make another ‘Alien’ movie.” Newsflash: The alien concept is dead. Leave it alone, and leave poor Ian Holm out of it.

Though “It Ends With Us” ultimately lands in the zone of social commentary, the experience is mainly one of witnessing life as experienced by one woman over the course of years. And it’s worth the journey because of Lively and her simultaneous and contradictory mix of pleasantness and cold discernment.

It’s a line that all horror movies must walk. The characters must be stupid enough to get themselves into trouble, but not so stupid that we don’t start thinking of them in Darwinian terms. Somehow, “Cuckoo” stays on the right side of that line, but barely.

The new movie splits the difference between the horrible and the hilarious, with predictably lukewarm results. Still, the story is delicious enough to survive an earnest treatment.

The Instigators is unremarkable but consistently amusing, and makes you feel like everyone showed up at the set expecting a party.

Genre movies like “The Fabulous Four” can only be so good, but it’s pleasing enough to do its job.

It’s definitely not for everybody, but even a non-fan stumbling into the theater accidentally will find whole sections here to enjoy.

There was enough story here for an epic, but Napper chose to make a poem-like movie, one that sustains a tone of mystery and wonder from start to finish.

The last 15 minutes of “Twisters” are so much fun that they might easily convince viewers that they’ve seen a good movie. So this leaves you with a choice: Is it worth suffering through a boring hour and a so-so half hour, just to see an entertaining opening and a genuinely exciting finish? I know what I’d say (nope), but this is one you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Green Border has the directness and truth of a documentary and the emotional immediacy of a narrative feature.

Fly to the Moon is absolutely awful. The only interesting thing about it is how long it takes for a viewer to figure out how bad it really is.

Murphy is the key here. It would be a pleasant surprise to our time-traveling moviegoer from 1984 to find Murphy looking so much like his old self and in possession of his old gifts. His comic timing remains impeccable, and laughing with him here is both fresh and familiar, an ideal combination.

A Family Affair never even makes the case as to why these people should be together.

The human connection the two characters make in this film would be understandable to anyone in any century, past or future. For that reason, there’s a very good chance here that Hall, Penn and Johnson have made more than a good movie with “Daddio.” They may have made a classic.

The best thing that can be said for “Kinds of Kindness” is that it’s never quite boring, despite being 164-minutes long and lacking much of a story.

This is a welcome and unusual movie, and Gere gives a compelling performance.

Even if you’d never in a million years want to ride with these guys, “The Bikeriders” makes you understand why they wanted to ride with each other.

The tone of “The Exorcism” is deadly serious, but one wonders if the premise might have worked better as a scary comedy rather than as a scary drama.

Almost single handedly, [Louis-Dreyfus] muscles “Tuesday” into the territory of being worth seeing.

It’s hard to say what McCarthy intended with “Brats,” but he ended up making a cautionary film for journalists. As such, it may have a limited audience, but if it’s seen by the right people, it might do some good.

Going into this movie, there was a question whether “Bad Boys” might just feel like entertainment from an earlier time, but instead it feels like a cozy return — at least as cozy as possible, given that the movie is extremely violent.

With “Young Woman and the Sea,” Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle finally gets the movie she deserves.

Ezra is an opportunity for Bobby Cannavale to show his abilities as a dramatic actor, but his performance is hampered by one thing: He plays an idiot.

In “Atlas,” Jennifer Lopez does everything she can to act her way toward a good movie. Unfortunately, she can’t do it well enough to make a difference.