Mick LaSalle

To watch Rifkin’s Festival and Allen’s previous film, A Rainy Day in New York (2019), is to wonder whether this is a filmmaker who has ceased to understand the world.

The King’s Daughter has a script that reads like it was written in crayon, by someone using only their thumbs. But two good performances make the film watchable: Pierce Brosnan as King Louis XIV and William Hurt as his adviser and confessor, Pere Francois de La Chaise.

It’s not boring bad, but flashy bad. It’s not “I’m sick of this, already.” It’s “I can’t believe what I’m looking at.”

The best thing to say about “Munich: The Edge of War” is that it has an interesting take on Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who preceded Winston Churchill. In the opinion of many historians, it’s not the correct take, but at least the movie has a point of view.

In “France,” Dumont has not created a commentary on modern life, so don’t approach the movie looking for that. He’s made a movie about the consequences of modern life for one person, a portrait of contemporary mores as seen from the inside.

The lesson here is something we already know but sometimes don’t admit: A movie doesn’t have to be any good in order to be good. Sometimes it can just be nonsense that’s easy to watch. “The 355” is a guilty pleasure, only don’t waste time feeling guilty.

What keeps us glued to our seats are a series of unexpected plot turns, little and surprising story moments that create curiosity and sometimes anxiety. Just as one of these elements resolve, Almodóvar presents another, so that there is no point in Parallel Mothers at which the audience can become bored or complacent.

The best aspect of “A Hero,” and probably the aspect which Farhadi would most like us to contemplate, is the internal journey of Rahim, who, over the course of his difficulties, slowly and belatedly seems to come into his manhood.

Everything about Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” is striking and remarkable — except Denzel Washington as Macbeth and Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth. This is not to say that they’re terrible, because they’re not. They’re better than decent. If you saw them in a regional stage production, and you didn’t know who they were, you might go home saying you saw a pretty good show. But neither is quite up for their role nor quite right for it.

Watching Licorice Pizza is simultaneously like watching life with all the boring parts cut out and like watching movies with all the phony parts cut out.

In the end, it’s the ideas at work in The Matrix Resurrections, much more than the action, that keep us contentedly in our seats for well over two hours.

So, The King’s Man is a mess, purposeless, pointless, witless. However, it’s not obnoxious. At times, it can even be close to enjoyable watching it squirm and try to make sense of itself. It has a genial idiocy and one genuinely effective sequence, involving mountain climbing. So, to its credit, it’s never actively annoying. It’s just, from start to finish, a disappointment.

Tender Bar is a lovely movie — so long as it stays within a half mile radius of the bar. When it drifts from the bar, it collapses. When it goes back to the bar, it lifts a little. But it stays away too often to be called a success.

The filmmakers put their faith in a character, not fireworks, and the result is big blockbuster that feels more like a sweet little movie.

Though it never runs out of gas or even shows signs of sluggishness, del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” runs out of importance about a half hour before the finish. But it’s still an entertaining movie by a distinctive filmmaker.

Still, no matter how flat “The Lost Daughter” can sometimes seem, there’s always something to hold our attention. The movie is never great, but it’s never exactly dull. There’s always a reason to stick around for the next scene.

Don’t Look Up might be the funniest movie of 2021. It’s the most depressing too, and that odd combination makes for a one-of-a-kind experience. Writer-director Adam McKay gives you over two hours of laughs while convincing you that the world is coming to an end.

The bottom line on Being the Ricardos is that it’s irresistible. It’s an invitation to go behind the scenes of the “I Love Lucy” show and to see what Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were really like. It’s also an invitation to travel back to the 1950s, with writer-director Aaron Sorkin as your guide.

As in The Florida Project, Baker lingers too long on the atmospherics, and that’s fatal here, because Red Rocket is a comedy and needs a brisk rhythm.

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.

In essence, Sorrentino thought his way up to the middle of The Hand of God and assumed the rest would take care of itself. He started filming too soon. His screenplay needed work.

Benedetta continues Verhoeven’s strong run with as good a movie as he’s ever made.

Not counting no-budget movies with casts of nonprofessionals, The Humans is one of the worst-directed films in recent memory. It plays like a wicked practical joke or a deliberate act of sabotage.

Scott is having a remarkable year. To be exact, he’s having a remarkable season. Less than two months ago, “Last Duel” was released and it was Scott’s best film in years. Now the even-better House of Gucci is his best film in years — and it’s different from his previous work.

Directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West, the team behind the Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary, RBG, the film makes the case for Child as an instinctive feminist and a profound cultural influence, who transformed how and what Americans ate in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Power of the Dog is a beautifully composed work by a filmmaker at the height of her powers. It deserves our attention.

It provides unvarnished behind-the-scenes access to a presidential campaign, showing aspects of the process that we would never see otherwise.

Once the focus switches to Venus, whatever is going on with Richard becomes secondary. In her scenes on the court, Sidney is able to convey the double quality of a killer in embryo and a vulnerable kid.

Clifford the Big Red Dog brings a warm feeling every time I think of it, and I’m really glad I saw it.

Everyone has a story from childhood that remains vivid in memory, and that feels important enough to immortalize in art. But few people have the ability to get their story out from their minds and onto the page, the stage or the screen. Yet when that does happen, and when it’s done right, you can get something original and heartfelt, such as Kenneth Branagh’s autobiographical Belfast, one of the glories of this year’s cinema.

It takes one of the most gifted screen actresses of her generation and casts her out to sea with nothing to hold onto but a hideous script that’s all attitude without depth or understanding.

Without the sheer watchability of Johnson, Reynolds and Gadot, Red Notice would have been intolerable. It also would have been pointless. But with them, it’s a pleasantly lousy movie that some people, if they look at the screen and squint really hard, might mistake for something decent.

But there’s not enough in “Finch” to sustain an audience’s interest for a full 115 minutes. At 85 minutes, it might have been a touching and eccentric novelty. As it stands, “Finch” is something of a slog. A slog in good company, but a slog all the same.

Eternals is like a movie about a horse race that concentrates all its attention on characters that neither own a horse nor like to gamble.

Last Night in Soho is full of color and darkness, and its melange of past and present evokes one of the world’s great cities. It never lets up.

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

A documentary that doesn’t have the stomach to tell the story of what happened on Jan. 6 explicitly, and to express the real threat to American democracy that that day represents, is of no use to anybody.

The artistic signature is unmistakable — 30 seconds in, you’d know you were watching a Wes Anderson movie. But Anderson’s human connection seems to have short-circuited, so that his irony now bypasses the world and becomes an ironic contemplation of his own work. This is a dead-end, and it’s just not interesting.

It’s average. If you like this sort of movie, knock yourself out.

The movie’s length is, at times, a challenge, but Dune is so original and contains so many strong scenes that the length mostly isn’t a problem.

The Last Duel, directed by Ridley Scott, gives us the texture of life in 14th century France, so much so that we feel that we are there, in this place that’s desperate and foreign and yet human and familiar.

If you ever liked Madonna, this concert film will remind why you weren’t wrong. Madame X is somewhere between a success and a triumph.

The narrative doesn’t generate much interest; the nature of the ultimate ending is discernible from a distance, and the movie’s message about nature and the natural order seems forced. Still, there’s a lot here that’s impressive. Lamb is too vivid and original to forget.

The story is the story, and you’ll either connect with it or you won’t. But no matter how you react, Titane has the integrity of sincerity and the authority of a filmmaker’s real skill and vision.

To say Venom: Let There Be Carnage is not worth seeing is not enough. It’s not worth admitting into your life, even as an option. You’ve read a review of it. That’s enough. Now, never think of it again for the rest of your life.

Craig leaves the series in a mammoth, 163-minute extravaganza that audiences will be enjoying for decades. It’s a lovely thing to see.

Director Stephen Chbosky needed to bring this stage musical into greater balance with the film medium. He needed to make Dear Evan Hansen less grandiose. He needed to pick up the pace and chop 10 minutes from the running time. It’s still possible that wouldn’t have saved it, but it might have made it less awful.

If you know the world of “The Many Saints of Newark” — maybe you’re Italian American from the East Coast, and have at least a dim memory of the late 1960s — this prequel to “The Sopranos” TV series is both accurate and oddly hilarious.

Maggie Q has been in good movies before, but The Protégé is the first movie that’s good because she’s in it.

It’s not an exciting film, and it’s not a film with some wider social relevance. But it’s a film that’s wise about people in a way that’s rare. It also launches Dylan Penn, and someday that will matter.

CODA is lovely. If you want to see a movie that will make you feel good, this is it.

Apart from a few lapses, Filomarino is straightforward and gets the job done. Along the way, he taps into everyone’s most paranoid fantasy about foreign travel — where the police and authority figures turn on you, and the Constitution or Bill of Rights are a few thousand miles away.

In the end, Homeroom lacks impact, taken as a whole, but anyone who sees it will derive something from the experience.

Respect has everything you could hope for in a musical biopic. It has a good story and great songs and, best of all, it has someone in the lead role who can put those songs over.

Long before the end, audiences will stop worrying about the characters and start worrying about themselves — about when they’ll get to leave.

In The Suicide Squad, writer-director James Gunn has done the seemingly impossible: He has found the fun in the Suicide Squad. He has come up with a way to take what seemed like a dead concept and turn it into an action-packed joke machine.

The film is kindly and well-intended, but it’s also sentimental and lifeless. Swan Song is a rare movie without a single good scene.

Though there are political elements here, to be sure, Pray Away has more the feeling of witnessing multiple spiritual journeys. These journeys are, by their very nature, moving.

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.

To their credit, by the time the movie ends, Blunt and Johnson have made the sale. I believed them and liked seeing them together. They don’t make Jungle Cruise worth seeing or even worth tolerating. But for scattered minutes across this wasteland, they make it less painful.

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

Old is, at times, clumsy and obvious, but it’s different and weird, and it taps into something essential. It might be a distant second to The Sixth Sense, but it’s the second-best movie Shyamalan has made.

Audiences will come away feeling like they’ve really been somewhere, that they were moved by the people they met and expanded by the experience. You can’t ask more from a movie.

It’s a flat, forlorn movie with occasional sparks of life.

Summertime is the first movie ever like Summertime, and on that basis alone, we should appreciate it.

Black Widow is what happens when movies abandon human values for the emotional deadness and emptiness of the superhero movie.

It would probably be a mistake to emphasize the relationship aspect of The Tomorrow War too much. At its core, this is just a really good monster movie. All the same, there’s a touch of beauty to it.

In all ways, it’s unexpected — in its subject, in its treatment of its subject, and in its whole look and feel. It’s an original and interesting movie.

A movie can’t just be crazy, lest it go off a cliff and never land. It also needs a human core, and Diesel and Rodriguez are it.

If anything, this modest but entirely charming movie may deserve a tiny slice of immortality by showing the kind of goofy, escapist fun that can be created even in a grim time.

To its credit, no matter how self-important and dreary Infinite gets at times, it’s never dull, and there’s always a little sparkle to it and a reason to keep watching.

Awake fails only in the sense that it’s a movie in one note, and thus its story only knows one direction, which is downhill.

The obvious thing to expect here is that writer-director Christian Petzold is using the Undine”myth as a metaphor. But no, he’s doing the actual myth.

In this new Conjuring, every scene of demonic possession, every demonic hallucination, and every underworld visit and visitation land with unsettling impact. These are, in a sense, action scenes, and they’re creepy, chilling and very well done.

The idea of a worldwide calamity returning with a vengeance is an awful prospect that audiences, at this moment in particular, might find dreadful. So, it’s especially easy to sympathize with the characters in these early moments. Yet after the opening, A Quiet Place II doesn’t show us anything new, and soon the movie’s energy flags.

Everything that’s good about Cruella can’t obscure the fact that it was a very bad idea. The movie makes gestures toward style. It has first-rate costume design. The soundtrack contains a series of well-loved but mostly irrelevant pop songs from the 1960s and ’70s. But we still end up with a movie that should never have been made.

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.

Dream Horse is full of heart and interest. Throughout, Collette makes us believe in the human-animal connection between Jan and Dream Alliance, which is touching, mysterious and deep.

Bana is rock-solid throughout, able to convey sensitivity and moral probity through a not quite impassive facade — never overdoing it, never underdoing it — and yet fulfilling his duties as the movie’s locus of feeling and meaning.

In the end, the power of Final Account resides in the way it shows how human nature reacts to lies, propaganda and state-sanctioned atrocity. Some people, looking for an excuse to do evil, will jump right in. A very tiny faction will risk all to fight against them.

The Woman in the Window is, unfortunately, one of Wright’s amazingly bad movies, and this is a shame, with Amy Adams at the center of it.

Those Who Wish Me Dead pretty much works on the gut-level way it was intended, but it gets extra credit for being unintentionally funny.

Aside from the disgusting parts, Spiral is a fairly decent thriller.

If Wrath of Man has a weakness, it’s that even when everything is explained, it doesn’t quite make sense. But a movie like this is about pleasure in the moment, and on that score, it delivers.

Here Today is a weird case — not mediocre, not lukewarm, but genuinely bad and good, cringe-worthy and moving. Take this as a recommendation, and a warning.

Sollima knows how to film violence, so individual moments stand out. What Sollima can’t do is make a good movie from a bad script.

The likability of Lydia and Emily helps, but writer-director Ben Falcone’s tendency to milk emotion that isn’t there drags down the movie and some of the comic bits feel obvious and pushed.

French Exit is worth seeing because it gives a juicy role to Michelle Pfeiffer, who is something to marvel at. But it’s a frustrating film because, as a whole, it’s just not nearly as good as its central performance.

Using footage mostly from the cameras of various passengers and crew, the documentary takes us inside the experience of being stuck inside a floating prison, unwanted by any port, as COVID cases and fears mount. It’s an experience you would not want to have directly, but it’s fascinating to watch.

If you’re looking for scenes of big, awful creatures fighting each other and knocking over skyscrapers — and for the spectacle of people scurrying below, running from the huge stomping feet — you will find little to dislike in Godzilla vs. Kong. It does its job. It’s a monster movie.

As you enjoy the movie’s gleeful outrageousness, take a moment to appreciate the strategic sophistication of some of these bits. These scenes were well planned.

In the Taken movies, the hilarity of mild-mannered Neeson going on a family vacation with hand grenades in his suitcase was never acknowledged, but it was there and part of the fun. Here, the comedy is closer to the surface, thanks to the wit of Kolstad’s screenplay and of Ilya Naishuller’s direction.

Tom O’Connor’s script hits all the right notes, and Dominic Cooke’s direction brings out unspoken subtleties of the characters and their interactions.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League may not be a great film, but it has the madness, strangeness and obsessiveness of a real work of art.

As a piece of filmmaking, the trick of Operation Varsity Blues is that it provides first-rate entertainment even as it incites sputtering rage.

It would be nice if there were more movies like this, but few have the talent to make them this well — to take a human scale story and make it feel, not bigger than life, but as grand-scale as life actually is.

By the end, “Coming 2 America” has us. It’s strange, these movies that create a warm feeling. It’s hard to say why or how. But when Murphy sits on the throne watching a bad lounge singer (also played by Murphy) perform “We Are Family,” it feels like the summation of the three decades of virtuosic silliness that Murphy has brought to the screen, and of all that has meant to us.

Aside from being annoying, depressing and repulsive, Chaos Walking has a lot going for it. It’s directed by Doug Liman (“Go”) and takes place in a fully imagined other world. Plus, it stars Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, who are smart and watchable, and the movie does get better as it goes along.