Mick LaSalle

Home for the Holidays strikes such a perfect note that it's hard at first to realize what an impressive balancing act it is.

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]

A delightful, witty picture that's short and sweet and presents one of the most accurate depictions of the behavior of teenage boys you're ever going to see on screen. [22 Mar 1991, p.E1]

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.

With Woo, violence is not just a means to an end. It's something pretty; it's fascinating. His talent is an original and peculiar one. Woo brings an esthetic sensibility to bear on the phenomenon of a good guy beating people up -- and to the spectacle of a violent shoot-out. Explosions aren't just impressive but beautiful. [20 Aug 1993, p.C1]

"Human Resources" was a good, straightforward tale, but Time Out is better. It's haunting. It's like a poem.

There are lapses in character motivation, and at times the film takes on a cartoony feeling. But if you worry about those things, you shouldn't be watching action movies. For its genre, Broken Arrow is a class act.

Disclosure is a frankly adult picture. The seduction scene is protracted and genuinely sexy -- though what this woman sees in Douglas is a mystery. The talk in Disclosure is also frank -- and unusually explicit. People talk about sex in this picture as they would in life.

Obviously, Barrymore is not ideally cast outside modern times, but her presence is so good-natured that she makes an audience want to work with her.

Big as it is, Blade' is meticulous and subtle, not just in its camera technique but in the way it works its themes and creates a mood.

Worth seeing, both for the ways it's timeless and for the ways it encapsulates an era.

The Ref, not just about a premise but about people, is the rare good comedy that actually gets better as it goes along. [11 Mar 1994, p.C1]

Talk about disturbing.

Unlike "Pirates," Stardust is anything but a wretched mess. It's a charming and smartly plotted fantasy.

In thematic terms, Cassandra's Dream could be looked at as a rebuttal to "Crimes and Misdemeanors."

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.

The great strength and slight weakness of “How to Have Sex” is that it’s just like being there — except you might not want to be there.

As the documentary shows, while it lasted, it was really something.

If there’s a weakness to The D Train, it’s only in the filmmakers’ ultimate choice to stop the pain right before the finish, as if any good might really come to the characters they’ve created. Perhaps the assumption was that, by then, audiences will have suffered enough. But some misery you really can’t get enough of, especially when it’s happening to other people.

This time it’s not too big. Thor: Ragnarok has a lot of human appeal and a spirit of silliness that it never loses and yet always carefully manages, so that the silliness remains an ongoing source of delight without ever undercutting the impact of the action.

As Mister Rogers, Tom Hanks does something very important, besides looking and sounding enough like Fred Rogers that we can accept him in the role. He captures the supreme self-confidence it takes to be that nice and giving.

Captures the flavor of putting on a show on Broadway.

A gentle comedy, offbeat but never cute, never lewd and never going for shortcut laughs that might diminish character.

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

Red Rock West' is filled with delightful twists of plot, and the twists start coming early -- so we'll leave off talking about the story. [28 Jan 1994, p.C3]

It's fascinating.

It's probably the only love story you'll see this decade that will make you half-expect the camera to swerve and pick up the sight of Rod Serling, standing there in a black suit.

The movie is long, and here and there it seems to meander. But when it arrives at its anguished last scene, there's no doubt that Eustache knew where he was heading all along.

I Care a Lot is notable for its colorful supporting and featured roles — Chris Messina as a mob lawyer, Peter Dinklage as a Russian mobster and Eiza Gonzalez as Marla’s girlfriend. But the main attraction is Pike, who doesn’t try to make us like her. She commits to the character’s nature and holds us with her honesty, her intensity and her unmistakable pleasure in getting to play someone appalling.

It's a lovely film that grows along with the characters. At first, it seems like a pleasing but inconsequential comedy. But it deepens as their connection deepens and opens up into a place of poignancy and insight.

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.

Jurassic World is an intelligent action movie that’s saying something simple but true: Yes, people are that stupid.

Has some faults, but it manages to keep its audience either angry or jumpy from start to finish.

It's a one-of-a-kind experience -- dark, bleak, twisted carnival noir.

With a movie like this, we know what has to happen. The fun is in seeing how it happens. Ryback is an explosives expert, so there are some delightful bomb interludes. He makes a bomb for the microwave, takes a missile apart and puts it back together and comes up with original ideas, such as rigging a hand grenade to a door so it will explode when the door is opened. Under Siege is a lot like Die Hard moved to a battleship. [09 Oct 1992, p.C3]

Very good at pointing out the social difficulties surrounding the Dickens-Ternan relationship, the power dynamics within it and the lasting effects of it.

An impressive and imaginative fantasy.

In The Chaperone, Brooks is something of a fixed entity, a fully-formed force of nature already heading toward her peculiar form of glory. She has stuff to do all day — studying by day and partying by night, while Elizabeth McGovern as Norma has time to look inside.

The Crush is the latest in the growing ''from hell'' genre, about all the fun things that happen when a ferocious, precocious 14-year-old girl develops an intense crush on the nice-guy journalist who rents a guest house from the girl's parents. Things start innocent. Get worse. Get horrible. Get ridiculous. You know the formula. Working within that formula, The Crush isn't bad.

The High Note begins well, ends well and even has a good middle, but there’s one extra plot turn, about 15 minutes before the finish, that’s one too many. It doesn’t spoil the movie, but it adds an unwelcome touch of sentimentality into a story that is otherwise fairly tough throughout.

The Beekeeper is the purest stupid fun I’ve had in a movie theater since “F9: The Fast Saga” in 2021.

Between the lines, Scoop conveys, not only what Andrew most likely did, but what led him to assume that he’d get away with it.

Book Club was, at best, a pleasant diversion. But Book Club: The Next Chapter is something more. It’s a movie that proves that it’s possible to make an entertaining, full-length picture with practically no story.

The acting is uniformly strong, which says something about King as a director.

Director Le-Van Kiet and screenwriters Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton succeed by making the action look real, by coming up with intriguing plot twists and keeping our heroine in danger at all times.

The documentary is exclusively about Ullmann and Bergman as human beings and about how they got along.

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

While it's possible to have a great time with the movie without having any interest in Kiss, it should be noted that the band does make an appearance.

Everyone in the movie is excellent, everyone is tonally spot-on, and no one has a single bad moment – which is another way of saying that Clea DuVall, best known as an actress (“Veep,” “Argo”), is a real director. She has made one of the best Christmas movies of the millennium.

For starters, it's a movie to make you happy to see the next movie written, directed and starring Lake Bell. She has an engaging presence and has a distinct comic sensibility.

It's not just for people who like rap or the rap atmosphere. It's a well-paced, light comedy that can appeal to anybody. [05 Jun 1992, p.D1]

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.

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.

Director Curtis Hanson gives the film a slow, European pace and a cold, slick look. The sound-track is made up almost entirely of internal noises -- a buzzing fluorescent bulb, music from a record player. Everything contributes to an ominous atmosphere. [09 Mar 1990, p.E1]

A lot of frivolous but genuine laughs.

This is a beautiful film, full of gray-and white-haired men who grow in stature before our eyes.

Hardly perfect or fully successful, but it's strange and strangely beautiful -- a unique work of art.

Clumsy and ineffective in its first half hour. But gradually, as her investigation deepens, and we see the true hideousness of what she is uncovering, the movie achieves urgency and clarity of purpose.

Watchable in spite of Greengrass as much as because of him. The story is good enough to make viewers want to ignore the photography.

At its best, Ajami shows you things you never would have considered or imagined.

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

Sometimes excessiveness and implausibility are virtues in disguise. Movies this enjoyable don't come about by accident.

In addition to being a smart comedy and an excellent showcase for Grant, it's an honest movie about childhood that avoids sappiness and sentiment and goes in unexpected directions.

The drama builds and builds until the last seconds and never really lets up. It’s a striking debut from Meneghetti, in his first feature film.

Bogdanovich takes a tale of old Hollywood and infuses it with velocity and enthusiasm.

Kong: Skull Island is a smart SciFi action movie that doesn’t rely on a handful of monsters and random scenes of computerized destruction to run out the clock. It has a smart script, imaginative filmmaking and a cast of fine actors that actually get to act.

Ashkenazi is a terrific actor, commanding and grand-scale in his aura, but with an unmistakable warmth. And Gere, cast against type, couldn’t be better. In a career of only good performances, this is one of his best.

I liked this movie, maybe more than I should have, and would be happy to see anything this director wants to do next.