Mick LaSalle

One of the most incisive and perceptive Hollywood films about Hollywood.

Though One Fine Morning is low-key and flows easily from one scene to the next, it’s truly innovative and original. Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve has cracked a code. She figured out how to make a kind of movie that other filmmakers would love to make but don’t know how.

Directed with playful wit and energy, with steamy sex scenes played as much for laughs as anything else.

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

Leaves an impression, while its specifics fade almost immediately.

The Green Knight is a strange film — so out of step with current trends, so original in its conception, so willing to take its time and follow its own course — that it must be counted among the better films of 2021.

A thoughtful, satisfying action thriller.

Take Shelter has a problem, the simplest of all problems but no less serious for its being simple. It's a film without suspense and with a slow-moving story that unfolds without surprise or embellishment.

One of the great Holocaust films.

Get Out reveals an underlying unease. It diffuses tension, even as it points to its source. It may be somewhat rough and unrefined and even ill-considered in some of its particulars. Yet it may stand as a kind of pop culture document of this historical moment, a moment that’s not nearly as funny as this movie.

The big news about Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is that it’s a magnificent movie, even by Spielberg standards and even by “West Side Story” standards.

The experience of seeing this film is cumulative, sober and profound.

The right mix of humor and horror and with not even a shred of sentimentality.

The movie’s failure to engage is illustrated by directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s approach to the climactic scene. They shoot it almost entirely in long shot, as if inviting the audience not to care — or worse, as if admitting there was nothing to care about, after all.

Hornby's humane and humorous screenplay is true to the film's title: In short order, young Jenny finds out important truths about identity, glamour and how adults really think and live.

A remarkable documentary about an almost unfathomable ordeal.

Out of the Past is cinematic perfection, a Hollywood classic that's as great and as enjoyable as its reputation has promised.

Knocked Up has some rough edges, but it's a noteworthy film by a significant and blossoming talent.

There's no attempt at greatness here, just a fabulously successful attempt at a good crime movie. The Oscar-bait self-consciousness of "Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator" is gone. In its place is a buoyancy, an impish delight in telling a harsh urban story in the most effective terms possible.

Snake Eyes collapses in a crosscurrent of conflicting character motives, joyless plot twists and who-cares violence.

What this uncaring man is doing to her (Ida), he's about to do to a nation of 50 million people. And all of them will hate themselves in the morning.

All over this movie there are cliches that are just plain embarrassing, and unsettling moments in which it's obvious Kloves is writing about stuff he doesn't know a thing about. [13 Oct 1989, p.E1]

Pacino and Crowe are at their best, but the supporting cast also shines.

A seriously good movie, a challenge to viewers, a rebuke of the way many Americans live their lives.

If you have to watch someone cooking or eating, Juliette Binoche is as good a choice as any, but even she can’t make scintillating entertainment out of chewing, stirring a pot and putting on oven mitts.

It’s a sophisticated piece of work, slightly haunted, with an underlying sorrow that can’t be resolved or remedied.

You will look in vain for some definite logic to Holy Motors. You could see it as a metaphor for the actor's life, or a story about the desire to transcend the self. Anything you decide is fine.

Though the movie is riddled with memorable scenes of violence, its pace is slow -- too slow. It has an epic sprawl, but it's not an epic. It's more like a bloated fairy tale. [7 Aug 1992]

An action blockbuster extravaganza that's sadder than sad and never pretends otherwise.

Will Smith has the right quality for the role -- he's an easy man to root for -- but he augments this by channeling some inner quality of desperation and need.

It’s a good, not great, movie, but it has some of the elements that make Linklater’s work special. Few filmmakers are quite as keyed into the passing of time, as the source of all sweetness and heartache in the human experience.

The Past makes conventional movies feel artificial. Watching the characters interact in this movie feels like "Here is real life," and real life just happens to be strangely compelling.

Belushi is profoundly unfunny. Opportunities are provided for him to do shtick -- running amok in the jacuzzi, drooling over a pretty girl -- and it's like watching a form of communication from an alien civilization. What is he doing up there? [17 Aug 1990, p.E11]

An unforgettable examination of a host of dark impulses.

At times trying and perplexing, but it also contains some of the most psychologically insightful and ecstatic filmmaking imaginable.

So The Fabelmans is entertaining enough, but perhaps what’s best about it is that Spielberg got it out of his system. After this, he won’t ever need to make a film about himself or his parents again.

Watching the film one comes away feeling the bond that links these guys.

The movie is modest in its ambition and powerful in its reverberations.

A fine ensemble piece, but a maddening and unjustified length.

An exquisite and powerful documentary -- one whose elegance only heightens its devastating impact.

A documentary with the emotional power of the very best in narrative film. It has characters impossible to forget, moments impossible to shake and an ending that leaves the audience both moved and rattled.

Doesn't hit its stride until the last 30 minutes, and by then, it's just a little too late.

With Desplechin, it doesn't ever feel as though he's straining to show us things. It's more like we're just hanging out. We're in this house, and by some strange coincidence, every time we turn around, something interesting is happening.

In The Hero, as elsewhere, Haley really is dealing with the subject of heroism, but the kind of heroism not usually found in movies, the heroism of daily life.

[Soderbergh] plays with time and narrative to reveal character, mood and longing in ways you just don't find in a mainstream crime picture.

By tossing out all these voices and opinions, Lee and screenwriter Reggie Rock Blythewood have created both a time capsule and a movie audiences will talk about.

Judas and the Black Messiah quietly announces its modern relevance by presenting as sophisticated a depiction of systemic racism as you could hope to see in a movie.

An extraordinary film, mythic in feeling.

Husbands and Wives ultimately reveals itself as an extremely bitter film, with the kind of sour conviction that tries to pass itself off as wisdom. Allen knows how people talk and how they evade really talking. But his jaundiced vision -- as though he just found out that a marriage can't always be like the first month of dating when you're 17, and now he can't believe how crummy it all is -- just makes him seem naive. In the end his perception yields no insight. Old men like young women. Really? [18 Sept 1992, p.C1]

Throughout the film, Pitt exudes charm and a philosophical nature, but also the possibility of explosiveness. He doesn’t show you everything. What do you say about a performance like this? Scene by scene, Pitt seems to know what to do, all the time — and he never makes it look like work.

Leaf applies a documentarian’s dispassion to the telling of this fictional story, and to a large extent that works. One of the virtues of documentaries is also a virtue of this narrative feature — it depicts a kind of person who usually doesn’t get movies made about her and tells the world her story with respect and empathy.

You know what movie is even better than this? “Never Goin’ Back” (2018) from writer-director Augustine Frizzell, about two 17-year-old girls trying to raise money for a weekend getaway. It’s something like Booksmart, minus the rich Californians and the faint whiff of politically correct self-congratulation. Unfortunately, no one saw “Never Goin’ Back,” because it’s about working-class girls in Texas.

Stuns with writing, acting, direction.

It's a movie about a scrubwoman who paints - so don't expect lots of sex scenes or car chases. Just expect a great performance by Moreau, who will convince you that she painted every one of those paintings - and lived them all before she painted them.

Taken as a whole, these films constitute one of the greatest uses of cinema a documentary filmmaker has ever devised. Like the other films in the series, 49 Up is alternately touching and mundane, part soap opera, part reality show and part anthropological study.

BPM has vitality and directness, a sense of witnessing life in the moment.

Summer fluff that admits to being summer fluff, but it's no better off for admitting it...Intended as lightweight comedy, but if you think about it too much, it's not so funny.

If it's ultimately a failure -- and I think it is -- it's still worth seeing, because it's the most ambitious and magnificent failure in recent memory. That, in a sense, qualifies it as a certain kind of "good movie."

The film is exciting in two big ways: its simplicity of story (Tanovic does not get bogged down trying to give us an epic history) and the breadth of Tanovic's vision.

Moving On is effortlessly intelligent in depicting the experience of being old. Even if you’re not there yet, you know intuitively that old age has very little to do with sitting in a rocking chair in perfect equanimity. It’s about living with the accumulation of things you did and things you didn’t do.

The movie establishes a quality of history by filming in black and white and shooting from a distance, so as to emphasize the broad picture.

Toy Story 4 is genuinely gripping for most of the way, with just a couple of minor dips. But it arrives at a lovely place, with an embrace of life in all its danger and uncertainty.

What makes The White Ribbon a big movie, an important movie, is that Haneke's point extends beyond pre-Nazi Germany.

Art is either alive or dead, and this movie is emphatically and exuberantly living, energized by what can only truly be described as love. The movie’s love is for the place, for the characters and for all their dreams. In movies, as in life, love is rare. It makes everything better, and it must be respected.

The impressive thing that Oslo, August 31st does is that it somehow relates what Anders is going through to the city of Oslo in general. Anders is not a metaphor for Oslo - that would be cheap and silly. Rather, he is just one more story in the naked city, and we see him against the backdrop of other people, having quite different lives.

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.

The casting is carefully considered, as well, from Willis, whose Old Joe is even more dangerous than Young Joe, to Emily Blunt, who goes American this time and plays a young mother with a winning warmth and vulnerability.

In Graduation, Mungiu takes a scalpel and dissects life in modern Romania. He shows what’s wrong with the government and the impact this has on people’s relationships.

The picture... is simple, sweet and elegantly written, and it benefits from the presence of Marlon Brando.

The result is like any other Lynne Ramsay movie, whether it’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin” or “Ratcatcher” — slow, soporific and, here and there, wonderful.

David Lowery has made a movie that is as outside the pattern of our current popular filmmaking as can be possibly imagined. That takes more than vision alone. It takes courage.

Most of Widows isn’t felt. It’s a cold exercise, and occasionally a ridiculous one, as when McQueen tries to get fancy, with camera angles that make no sense.

In King Arthur, everything goes wrong. The film combines the plodding sincerity of a Ph.D. dissertation with the brains of a high-concept Jerry Bruckheimer- produced blockbuster (which it is), and no one benefits.

Boys State is the most depressing film about boys since “Lord of the Flies.” If anything, it’s even more bleak, because it’s not fiction and it’s not allegory. No, this is a documentary about actual boys.

Most of life is melodramatic — emotional, involving and lacking the dignity of straight drama. 3 Hearts is life as felt from the inside.

Homicide is a haunting picture that nags at you, days later. It provides no neat answers to the questions it raises about the merits of assimilation vs. maintaining one's ethnic, racial or religious identity, but rather captures something of the times. It might not be the most satisfying movie out there, yet there's a sense about it that, years from now, Homicide will seem even better than it does today.[18 Oct 1991, p.D1]

It's an exuberant, well- crafted film that gets the audience involved on a gut level even before the opening credits are over.

The movie itself is a worthy thing, too, but it's not as good as Clooney is here, which is to say, it's not great.

It's a film that, in its own peculiar way, forces viewers to question their values and ask themselves how much they're willing to sacrifice for a functioning society, and how much is too much.

As innocent as a Disney movie -- and a lot more entertaining.

A smart and literate effort with a few weaknesses.

The movie lacks joy. It has poignancy and intelligence, and it holds interest, but it never opens up into happiness and fantasy. Maybe it's the recession.

It’s a school shooting movie for this particular moment and plays like a dispatch from the front lines. It’s past trying to figure out what these tragedies mean. It just wants to explore how a person might assimilate such a trauma and go forward in life.

The energy of the play's best scenes is dissipated in the film version, but they still work. [02 Oct 1992, p.C1]

This is human drama at its most intense and universal. This is the rare film that can change the way you think and see the world.

Perhaps the idea of watching Jeff Bridges as a drunken, broken-down, down-on-his luck country music singer in Crazy Heart doesn't automatically sound appealing. But think this: "The Wrestler." With good songs.

The result is a movie that combines a seriousness of purpose with an impish delight in craft, in a way Hitchcock would have appreciated.

The result is embarrassing: quick cuts and shaky, hand- held camera work, bad acting and lots of attitude.

The tone is low-key, and Franco never presses the audience. Instead, he lets scenes happen, avoiding close-ups and all other means of exaggeration or emphasis.

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.

It's hard to tell if Cage's performance is a grand stab at all-out, no-holds-barred comic acting or one of the worst dramatic performances in a film this year. [2 June 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E8]

Snags on the fact that neither story depicted -- not Kaufman's and especially not Orlean's -- is enough to sustain more than an incidental interest.

A funny movie, but also a serious movie, and — who knows? — maybe an important one.

Darkly comic tone of heroin-addiction film sets it apart

The movie drags.