Mick LaSalle

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

A gutsy movie, in that Leigh says something about life that nobody really wants to believe, and he says it forcefully: There is such a thing as "too late."

It's dull in the precise way that life can be dull. To watch it is like sitting in on a staff meeting, listening to people talk on and on and on. Professors are used to talking nonstop, and in a few cases in At Berkeley it's rather astonishing to hear them repeating the same ideas over and over, instead of just coming to a point and stopping.

Blade Runner 2049 is long and slow. It’s never boring, but it’s a little too mired in one sustained note of sadness to break out as a great experience or to stand out as a great movie. Still, there are some remarkable scenes.

Yet there's no getting around one awkward fact. The picture, which turns on a cataclysmic act of terrorism within U.S. borders, was made for a different audience from the one that's about to see it.

Seemingly loose and free-associative in style, Experimenter builds to an effect and, for all its humor — or rather, through its humor — makes a sober and chilling point.

The picture gently caricatures the folk music scene with dozens of delicate brush strokes, creating a picture that's increasingly, gloriously funny -- as in entire lines of dialogue are lost because the audience's laughing so hard.

The problem is the script, which, in scene after scene, contains no surprises.

It's still a good [movie], with its self-contained world of concert arenas and smoky clubs and sad, weird people who linger in the mind.

This simple premise -- a killer truck stalks a driver -- becomes the basis for an exceptionally fraught and well- made suspense film.

The evocative nature of Nelson's stillness is essential to the whole last movement of Fresh, an intricately plotted series of unexpected and related events. In a way, the audience has to read the meaning of the ending in Nelson's face. Fortunately Nelson has a face that can make you believe anything. [31 Aug 1994, p.E1]

The Man Without a Face saves itself from sugary sweetness by presenting the friendship of McLeod and Chuck against a harsh small-town background. The screenplay takes off in some strong directions, while Gibson, in his first film as a director, keeps it honest all the way. [25 Aug 1993, p.E1]

Unfortunately, as Pacific Rim Uprising wears on, the monsters and the machines take over — not the world, but the movie.

This picture is disgusting. [15 Aug 1986]

Without question, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is a remarkable piece of work, one of the most original and creative films of the past couple of years.

Extraordinary and beautiful.

For all the movie's coarse grandeur -- for all the blood in its battle scenes and the grim historical accuracy of its depiction of antediluvian medical procedures -- the story of Master and Commander feels like something intended not for adults but for children.

The best thing about The Banshees of Inisherin is Kerry Condon as Pádraic’s sister, an intelligent woman with an even temperament and a good sense of humor who finds herself marooned in the wrong part of Ireland and in the wrong half of the 20th century.

If there’s a surprise to Top Five, it’s the emotional undercurrent that Rock writes and Dawson brings out. What lingers hours later aren’t just the laughs but the people.

A great movie.

As plain awful as Untraceable is, possibly the worst thing about it is that it pretends to mean something.

Living in Oblivion is a rarity, a dark comedy that takes place almost entirely on a film set. Written and directed by Tom DiCillo, this is a very funny picture that presents the world of independent film making as a nightmare of conflicting egos, budgetary squalor and incompetence.

Everybody in Admission is funny - Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Lily Tomlin, Wallace Shawn - but they're not funny in Admission.

Bridge of Spies tells us that the Constitution is not some quaint national luxury but the road map out of the darkness.

Subdued yet percolating with suppressed emotion.

Invisible Life is not an entirely fun watch, and its 139-minute running time is an investment and sometimes feels like it. But it offers something more than the usual experience.

Denis' viewpoint and sympathies are sophisticated, complex and humane.

The experience of watching Foxcatcher is of constantly waiting for something to happen — and of giving up, long before something actually does.

They talk and talk, and somehow it's delightful.

As for Plummer, I don't know how he does it, but he somehow radiates gayness. It's nothing overt, just some internal shift, but if you saw only 10 seconds of Plummer in this film, you would know he was playing a gay man. You just might not know how you know it.

It is a mess of a film, botched but also misconceived, with a central performance by Natalie Portman that evokes nothing about Jackie Kennedy, beyond the stylish clothes and the secret smoking.

Deep Cover is a sleazy crime picture and a peculiar and twisted moral journey. It's also a terrific movie, and once you trace its lineage you begin to see why.[15 Apr 1992, p.E1]

Compelling.

Three Identical Strangers tells a remarkable story. In fact, it tells several. It’s already extraordinary 20 minutes in, and then it goes to unexpected and yet more amazing places, like a narrative feature by a master storyteller.

American Fiction is not a perfect film. The book trails off at the finish, and though the movie comes up with something better, the end still doesn’t feel ideal. But none of that matters as much as it might, because Wright gives the perfect performance.

We see the tormented, limited and potentially dangerous man underneath.

Even as it stands, Fish Tank is a valuable movie, though it aspires to a social insight it doesn't attain and a psychological penetration it won't maintain.

The film leaves us staggering with a strange, almost unbearable embrace of childish innocence and treacherous spite. It is powerfully depressing. [02 Mar 1990, p.E1]

Bernal is quite good as the young media specialist - it's always surprising to see how strong a presence he is in his Spanish-language films and how he all-but disappears in his American films. Is it a matter of the roles or the language? The jury is still out.

A movie about serendipity and spontaneity.

A Man Called Otto is a formula movie, and no matter the nuances, this formula is not that satisfying.

A fascinating look at a bizarre man and a brilliant talent. But a good deal of the movie is described by its subtitle -- "A Son's Journey'' -- and to the extent it is, the movie sags.

With his crisp intelligence always a step away from collapsing into paralyzing self-consciousness, and his polished good-boy veneer often giving way to hysteria and vulgarity, Grant is a delight. [18 March 1994, Daily Notebook, p.C-3]

The most consistently entertaining movie of 2012. It's 165 minutes long and shouldn't be a minute shorter, a film of surprises, both in story and in casting, and of moments of agonizing, teased-out tension. The dialogue is dazzling.

If this is the best we can do in terms of movies - if something like this can speak to the soul of audiences - maybe we should just turn over the cameras and the equipment to the alien dinosaurs and see what they come up with.

When the end finally arrives, it brings no sense of completion, just a sort of numb awareness that the pain has stopped.

Last time, Peele made a movie about the country. This time he made a movie about himself, and it’s even better.

Simply the most relentlessly entertaining film of the last few months.

The movie has some clumsy dialogue and awkward turns, but the picture is brisk and likable.

I like to think that sometimes when a film maker takes no shortcuts but does everything truthfully and sincerely, with an interest in nothing but the creation of something wonderful, he can be visited by a muse or a spirit that comes out of nowhere and, as a kind of reward, infuses his film with that extra element that can't be earned or whipped up from a recipe: magic. Much Ado About Nothing is a wonderful, beautiful film. It's not a perfect film -- it has Keanu Reeves in it. But it has that kind of magic. Very early on, from the first scene, really, it lifts up off the ground; and there it stays till the last shot, when the camera itself lifts off, and we in the audience look down on lots of happy people dancing in an elaborate Italian garden. [13 May 1993, p.E1]

A brutal movie, brutal in all the right ways -- brutally stark, brutally funny, brutally brutal. [30 Oct 1992]

It’s awful. But it could be where movies are going — into a wasteland.

Skyfall is a different kind of Bond movie, one that works just fine on its own terms, but a steady diet of this might kill the franchise. One Skyfall is enough.

If only Lars von Trier took into account that audiences might actually want to enjoy Melancholia, rather than endure it, or sift through it, or submit to the director's will, he might have made something extraordinary.

Elaine May (left), known for making comedies, wrote and directed this brilliant crime film, which easily ranks among the best movies of 1977. [09 Jan 2005]

It's not a film for children, and it's not even something children would like. It's challenging and disturbing and uncanny in the ways it captures the nature of dreams -- their odd logic, mutability and capacity to hint at deepest terrors.

Movie magic.

On its own terms, the film is overlong, repetitive and lacks impact. Even if this were the first gorilla-in-love movie ever made, audiences would come away vaguely dissatisfied, suspecting there was an intriguing idea buried somewhere in here, but it didn't quite come off.

The movie is a total blast, and what a surprise.

A delicate film - not flimsy, but fragile - that holds together on the strength of Efron's physical presence and performance.

A movie that's loving and wistful and often hysterically funny.

The performances are extraordinary, as they often are in Beauvois’ films, with Baye a study in quiet suffering and Bry wonderfully enigmatic — seemingly simple, but hinting at a soul capable of expansion and adaptation.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One may not be a great movie, but it’s a special movie deserving of its own kind of event and worth appreciating. Only Tom Cruise makes movies like this, and you either understand why this is pretty wonderful or you should give yourself the chance to find out why.

Benediction is an awesome combination of wildness and control. Davies is out there all by himself, speaking a cinematic language that is his own and that has little to do with plays or literature.

Because Living is all about unexpressed emotion — and an unexpressed life — there are times when we’ll feel impatient with the characters; we’ll want them to throw off their restraints and say everything they’re thinking. Just don’t be in a hurry. Living gets where it needs to go, and gets its characters where they need to be, in its own good time.

A fable about women struggling to free themselves from that myth, and even at its most obvious, it's exhilarating.

The result is an original picture, not entirely successful, but successful enough, and delightful in its ability to surprise viewers, and juggle tones and keep every ball in the air. The World's End has the aura - and this might only be an attractive illusion - of something imagined whole, in a burst of inspiration, rather than as something labored over.

Ultimately, Ford v Ferrari is about art versus commerce, devotion versus cynicism, and inspiration versus deadness. It’s one of the year’s great films, and of all the great films so far, the most accessible.

The plane crash in Flight must go down as one of the strongest single scenes of 2012: It's extended, detailed, technically and emotionally realistic, and beyond that, it reveals character.

As a movie about mental illness, Silver Linings Playbook is more lightweight than lighthearted. But thanks to Lawrence, it does one good thing most movies don't do. It actually gets better as it goes along.

All this is interesting, or interesting enough, depending on how you feel about Elaine Stritch. If you're a particular fan, this documentary is a must-see. But for everyone else, a little of Elaine's personality goes a long way.

The Flash gets credit for effort, because this superhero movie isn’t trying to be stupid and convoluted. It gets there by accident.

From the beginning, Midway has awkward dialogue and an atmosphere that seems a bit too 2019, but for a time, the movie’s high stakes make up for that.

The new Ridley Scott movie is fascinating and charming and crammed and overstuffed, and it’s a curious case, too. It gets all the seemingly hard things wonderfully right, but then caves in at points that should have been easy.

A film that might have seemed faintly academic six months ago becomes an anxious expression of its historical moment.

The movie has the simplicity and confidence of a Johnny Cash song.

The result is something rare, especially considering how fine the novel is, a film that's fuller and deeper than the book.

There’s a Danish film called “After the Wedding” which was released here in 2007 and nominated for the foreign film Oscar. It didn’t win — it had the bad luck to be nominated against “The Lives of Others,” which was even better. But it’s a great film. The new After the Wedding is the American remake, and it’s fascinating. That is, it’s fascinating in that it’s not even close to great, despite using the same scenario. Indeed, it would be a real lesson in filmmaking to watch both movies back to back, just to see how to do things and how not to do things. And, just to clarify, the new After the Wedding would be in the “how not to do things” category.

This vaguely funny film is also the saddest and most depressing movie of 2013.

The results are predictable and only mildly entertaining.

Cagney, the film's best asset, is irrepressible. [07 May 2006, p.34]

Extraordinary.

At times you may be moved as by no other foreign film this year - and then 10 minutes later be leaning forward in the seat just to stay awake.

Ages well in memory because it gradually seems to mean more. Its meaning can't be summed up in a sentence, but it has to do with a view of life as inexpressibly sad and yet always right.

A shrewd satire about stardom and the cult of celebrity.

The film is long, empty and bogus.

Incredibles 2 was 14 years in the making, and it feels almost that long watching it.

To think of how people thought and acted just 45 years ago is to realize that the women in this film were the advance guard of the modern era. That makes them important, and they make this documentary important.

Casino Royale is fresh, actually fresh.

One of the most original thrillers of the 1980s. It's a lurid, twisted film that brings you into its world and completely works you over.

Neither funny nor exciting. It’s at best incongruous, the kind of incongruity that seems delightful on the page but not in practice.

You leave Cinema Paradiso with that feeling that's kind of like getting kicked in the stomach, but nice. It's one of those breathless, swept-away-by-a-movie experiences that you might have once a year, if you're lucky. [16 February 1990, Daily Notebook, p.E-1]

Bergman has not gone soft, not emotionally, philosophically and certainly not artistically. This is as tough a film as he has ever made.

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.”

Love & Mercy captures with striking immediacy the unbound power of the artist in his element.

It's long; it's expensive, and it was clearly created with the intention of being a great film. I've got nothing against bloated epics, just as I have nothing against blockbusters. But as bloated epics go, Bugsy is not particularly special. [20 Dec 1991, p.C1]

In its modestly comic way, the movie delves into the question of when it’s better to lie than tell the truth.

If there's one big difference between this version and the old, it's in the attitude toward violence. The new version may be more graphic, but it doesn't present violence as inevitable or necessary, just ugly.