Mick LaSalle

That rare thing, an American romantic film that's not a comedy and that's more about love than sex.

Having hooked us with style, Wright knows he has to deliver on the story, and he does. His plotting is tight and fluid, wild and ultimately satisfying. It’s the ultimate cliche to compare a movie to a thrill ride, but sometimes the cliche applies.

Colette is never dazzling. It has erotic elements, but nothing like “Becoming Colette,” which is, on balance, a weaker film. There’s not a single great scene. But there is no scene that is less than intelligent. Colette is smart, conscientious and absorbing, and gradually, in its diligent way, achieves a certain fascination.

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.

Year One has one joke, but it's a good one, played for many variations over the course of an often very funny comedy.

Nanjiani is engaging throughout, though the scenes of his standup routine are a little confusing. He’s not funny, not even slightly. Is he supposed to be? That’s not clear.

The movie unfolds as a series of enjoyable, pressurized encounters between the lead character and everyone else — particularly, Bobby Cannavale as Carol’s ex-boyfriend.

Far from the year’s best movie, but in its best moments, it demonstrates a profound cinematic mastery.

Ultimately, no matter what angle you see Bliss from, the story converges on a choice and a question: Which world do you choose to live in? And what can bring a person back to reality?

Considering that most movies, even today, don't present a woman's romantic or sexual behavior in anything other than a spirit of judgment, She's So Lovely has to be regarded as something unique.

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.

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

A satisfying combination of great songs and strong dramatic performances.

Adapted by Caitlin Moran, from her own semi-autobiographical novel, it’s both a dead-on take on what it’s like to be a young critic as well as a smart movie about class and 1990s culture.

A generational spectacle that's fun to witness.

In terms of adrenaline, XXX is one of the most satisfying entries this summer.

The most refreshing thing about Summer of Sam is that it doesn't try to impose a moral or define the limits of its story.

By the finish, the movie is getting by on little but adrenaline and audience goodwill. Still, that goodwill runs fairly deep, because, taken all in all, 28 Days Later is a superior motion picture.

Shot in a glossy, appealing black-and-white and filmed in a single location, The Party generates a pressure-cooker atmosphere.

The overall aura is kind of ... welcoming. It’s impossible to take seriously, but easy to take.

It's brisk and assured and never begs the audience's indulgence. No time is wasted. The movie is, at every moment, either funny or pushing the story forward, or both.

Floats on the charm and the labors of its lead actress, Gretchen Mol, who single-handedly makes the picture worth seeing.

The real item under consideration here is the movie itself, and the bottom line is that it lands in a humane place. True, any viewer will go in with a certain curiosity, ghoulish or otherwise, about what it's like to jump off a bridge, and yet the overall effect of the film is broadening. To see it is to dread the bridge jumps and to come away with a feeling of compassion and empathy.

Stallone, often tortured in his movies, is cinema’s most tortured optimist.

A strange almost-thriller.

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

Gainsbourg is always going through a little more than she cares to tell the audience about, but the connection her character makes with Samba — real, complicated and not typical — is one of the movie’s highlights.

It's fresh, unexpected and goofy. It's not a smart career move, just a film that its director wanted to make for some crazy reason, and he made it.

An exciting thriller with good acting and a story that holds a lot of surprises and the interest of the viewer, even if it doesn't quite hold water. Or possibly because it doesn't hold water. [24 Apr 1992, p.C5]

Writer-director Lorene Scafaria based the movie on her own mother, and the clothes that Sarandon wears in the film actually belong to Scafaria’s mother. They fit Sarandon well, and so does the role.

Though the movie clocks in at just under three hours, it is -- aside from an occasional slow spot -- fascinating and exciting.

Monster House was designed as a family movie and a scary movie. It may scare children, but it won't terrify them. So it's no scarier than it should be.

There are extraordinary and beautiful things in War Horse, enough of them to make the movie a pleasure and a worthwhile experience, though not enough to trick the eye or get you believing this movie hangs together.

There's great pleasure in watching a movie in which the director has thought out everything beforehand.

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.

After a month, no one will talk about this movie, ever again. Still, with a picture like this, there's really only one question: Is it any fun? Yes. Lots. Definitely.

In his feature director debut, Grant Singer (previously a music video director who’s worked with artists from Sam Smith to Skrillex) adopts a measured pace that lends the movie a somber, mysterious aura. But he breaks that up with smart, psychologically insightful cutting.

You know how I realized I actually liked I Melt With You? I kept talking about it, and at one point, in the middle of mocking it, I accidentally referred to it as "a good picture." That's when I realized, yes, it really is good, albeit in ways that are different from other movies.

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.

A remarkable treat. It contains information about the writer heretofore unknown, and though it’s a dramatic feature and not a documentary, it claims to tell the truth, without embellishment. Even better, it was written by someone who saw the events depicted firsthand.

From the movie’s first minute, viewers will know they’re in the hands of a sure-footed storyteller.

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.

This is the second-best Spider-Man movie yet made. In the previous trilogy, only "Spider-Man 2" surpasses it.

Hillcoat and Cave give us more than an action story. They create a world.

For sure, this is a cause movie - sometimes it even feels that way - in favor of charter schools and against the teachers unions. Still, Won't Back Down is reasonably fair in its approach.

The mix of comedy and drama is winning; Costner couldn't be better, and the little girl is a find.

The series suddenly springs back to life. It's delightful and exciting, with good jokes and fun characters. While it might lack the freshness of the first installment, the formula isn't stale, just familiar. And familiar in a cozy and pleasant way. [25 May 1990, p.E1]

An inventive and caustic comedy that really does look like the thing it's mocking.

An extraordinary and heartfelt film.

If this isn't the single best performance ever by a preadolescent male (Osment) in a motion picture, then it's tied for whatever is first.

There's a case to be made for The Real Cancun as a document of the mating dance as well as an unintentionally poignant film about the brevity of youth.

Refreshing and worth seeing.

It doesn’t ascend to the sky. It’s not profound or great. But Vigalondo takes Colossal to all sorts of unexpected places and then brings it home, intact.

It's warm, spontaneous and heartfelt. Zeffirelli cared about his memories, and he's done justice to them.

An Irish drama that's a lot more sly and a lot less straightforward than it appears on the surface.

Maleficent imparts a feeling of enchantment. Here is a world that's strange and beautiful.

It does provide audiences with the satisfaction of seeing and hearing an important truth expressed, and that's better than making you feel good. That's making you feel something.

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.

It's a generous tale, told through big performances by a talented cast, presenting a range of colorful characters that only Dickens could have created.

Thirteen Lives deserves to be seen. The only question is whether audiences will be up for it. I saw it on a huge screen and had to occasionally remind myself that if it got really overwhelming, I could always close my eyes. It’s that intense.

Brought off with such skill and commitment that there isn't any time to snicker at its obviousness.

The action scenes are imaginative and elaborate without seeming fake. Nothing is belabored, and the stakes never stop escalating.

This movie is not recommended for people who need to know what's going on. The Woman in the Fifth, an English and French language film from the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, is watchable and enjoyable, but it's fairly impenetrable, and it gets more peculiar as it goes along.

Smart, sedate and well acted.

A balanced examination of the reasons for the electric car's disappearance, reasons that include corporate collusion and greed, governmental spinelessness and oil company propaganda -- but also consumer indifference and the limitations of the vehicles themselves.

Freeheld is formulaic, but some formulas are good if you do them right, and it helps knowing that it all really happened, or most of it.

By end of Cha Cha Real Smooth, you feel like you’ve met some people, and you liked them all, and it all felt true. For a 24-year-old filmmaker, that’s not bad.

What makes this film special and memorable is the character of Danny Green, who is not the usual neighborhood hoodlum you see in movies.

What it means in practice is that, with a Dardennes movie, nothing much seems to be going on - until everything seems to be going on. We watch events at a remove, and then, at a certain magical point, we are in the story, and we don't quite know how they did it - again.

The Grand Seduction slowly brings its story into focus and then sneaks up and becomes quite funny.

Two things to know about Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: It is appalling. And I haven’t laughed this hard at anything in months.

The period footage shows all the principals, including Neal Cassady, who was only 38 but looked 52. Ken Kesey emerges as the film's hero - he is presented as a great American adventurer, the psychological equivalent of Lewis and Clark. Maybe that's not as ridiculous as it sounds.

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.

Shrewd, highly controlled little film from Belgium that builds to an unexpected emotional climax.

It is funny in an absurdist way, but it’s heartfelt, too. It creates unease, but also sympathy.

Free State of Jones is an extraordinarily ambitious film, and for that reason, it’s not perfect.

Full of humor, some exciting scenes and some intelligent parallels between the world of the film and the political and moral issues facing us today.

Directed by Matthew Warchus, Matilda is a curious creation, one whose tone maintains the barest toehold in light musical comedy, while introducing dark, disturbing elements. The movie taps into the reality and the magnitude of childhood trauma.

Wildly imaginative, humane, playful and deflating of all pretense.

It's funny, easily the funniest and least self-conscious movie that director Nora Ephron has made.

French cinema has a lot going for it, but the one thing Americans do best is story. And so “Intouchables,” now The Upside, has a story that finally works.

There seems to be something about the story itself that's better suited to the stage than the screen.

A brisk, entertaining documentary that shows how the world of investment works.

Don't be fooled by the casual style. There is nothing casual about these emotions, or about the talent of these two filmmakers.

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

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

Elusive and compelling.

Late Night is a fairly agreeable experience, and every time Thompson is on screen, there’s a reason to keep watching.

Shaft has everything --smart writing, shrewd direction and a handful of performances that are first-rate by any standard.

Then there's the acting, particularly that of Sam Shepard, as an old ex-con without much in the way of limits.

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

Elisabeth Moss is an acting event all by herself, a modern version of Bette Davis, and The Invisible Man gives her a chance to embody all kinds of emotional extremes — terror, dread, madness, inconsolable grief and murderous rage.

It's about as close to French farce as romantic comedies get, and the closer the better.

Writer-director Eliza Hittman has made a controlled and reserved film, and she has placed at its center a reserved and controlled protagonist named Autumn, played with restraint by newcomer Sidney Flanagan.

Funny and intelligently made, a film for kids and adults that's both sweet and sardonic...Elf stays perfectly in balance, a pleasure throughout.

Beautiful Creatures has its metaphysical cosmology worked out, and it gives it to us in doses big enough that we understand its rules and believe in its world, but not so big that it starts to get cute or that we stop caring.

Baadasssss! is the portrait of a visionary with a blind spot, a man starved for kindness who can no longer recognize the responsibility to be kind, even to his kids. But it's a portrait of a visionary nonetheless.

This is a deluxe French film, longer than usual, with strong performances by French cinema mainstays Catherine Deneuve and Guillaume Canet and a movie-stealing turn from relative newcomer Adele Haenel, who has become a major French actress in just the past couple of years.

Girls Trip balances sincere sentiment and boisterous comedy with honesty and skill, and for people who like their comedy a little nasty, this one’s a blast.

In addition to Bana and Hall, Jim Broadbent is outstanding in a couple of scenes, as a government official, watching from the sidelines and offering warnings and advice. Broadbent is somehow menacing, pathetic and persuasive all at the same time.

Noah is no silly action blockbuster with a Biblical pretext. Rather, it's the product of writer-director Darren Aronofsky's vigorous engagement with the Biblical story and what it might mean in our time.

Frehling is excellent as a rigid do-gooder who thinks he understands everything and then comes up against crimes that shake his sense of the universe. His fresh fierceness is nicely balanced by Voss, who says little but radiates wisdom.

The strength and beauty of The Runaways are that it tells the truth.

Still, the goodwill lingers, even though Mother and Child falls down, dies and is beginning to look a little green and stiff about 15 minutes before the finish line.

The movie is harsh, nasty and vulgar like you wouldn't believe. And often, it's hilarious.

The tone is balanced, reflective and reasonable. Avni is a major star in Israel, and he is an actor with world-class charm.

A nasty little picture with a lot of wit and impudence.

As a Nicolas Cage movie — not just as a movie, but as a vehicle for what a specific actor can do onscreen — this is the most interesting thing Cage has done since “Face/Off.”

Like all Shelton's movies, Hollywood Homicide rambles and shambles, and like most of them, it ultimately settles into its own appealing rhythm.

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.

By the end, it is clear just how much in control Sayles has been all along. The resolution, though typically restrained, forcefully puts over the movie's point, that we're all more connected than we think.

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."

At times, State of Grace, which was written by the late playwright Dennis McIntyre and rewritten by David Rabe, is a little too writerly, a little too calculated to impress. Still the dialogue is good; the momentum builds, and some of the simplest scenes, such as a few between Penn and Wright, have real power. [05 Oct 1990, p.E1]

The battle in Battle: Los Angeles is grab-the-armrest tense until the last seconds.

Rules Don’t Apply feels unbalanced in terms of story, and it has a big sag in the middle. But the good things in it are so good that they make it a fairly worthwhile experience.

20th Century Women is not especially dramatic. At times, it eschews drama. Every time the story is on a knife edge and can drop deeper into turmoil or recede back to the normal flows and ebbs of life, Mills chooses the latter. But this time, the strategy works. It feels real.

For all the movie’s honesty, the reality of Alzheimer’s disease is a lot worse than what you see in Still Alice. Perhaps directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland made a calculation as to how much an audience can take. They were right.

For about 115 minutes, State of Play tells an alarming, tightly constructed story, with serious things to say about journalism and the state of the country. The movie appears to be all but over - and likely to stand as one of the best films of 2009. And then the filmmakers add one last embellishment, and they blow it.

This is a good movie for Hamm, and also for Pike who, in her recent films, has too often been either a madwoman or a victim of circumstance (and sometimes both). Here she gets to be active and think on her feet, and it makes a big difference.

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.

Any Agnieszka Holland movie is worth seeing, even if Spoor isn’t up to the director’s best (“In Darkness,” “Europa, Europa”).

Kevin Costner's Robin Hood is big, sometimes exciting, funny in places and occasionally stupid, but it doesn't disappoint. [14 June 1991, p.E1]

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.

At 2 1/2 hours, Gladiator is a long ride, but it doesn't drag.

Faithful but not slavishly faithful to the source, the movie retains most of the songs but streamlines the story, particularly in the second half.

A one-joke documentary stretched, with surprising success, to full length.

A tense, intelligent and sober film.

The constant shifting between today and years ago is, in and of itself, powerful.

Paul Thomas Anderson is getting there. He is a great director of scenes, not of movies, but in Phantom Thread he has devised a film that hangs in from start to finish, his first since “Boogie Nights.”

Actually, Mom is the essential difference between Wahlberg and Caan. Caan has the glow of mother love on him. Wahlberg plays Jim as having made the adjustment to a lack of love, but in a twisted way. He's gambling now to see if the universe loves him.

The funniest movie so far this year.

An old formula made fresh.

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.

Never soars, but it never flags. It remains brisk, engaging and pleasant throughout, and face it: If a movie this well made had Spanish or French subtitles, we'd all be talking about it as a searing examination of sexual politics.

By avoiding the usual animation cliches, by keeping the story moving, the pictures pretty and the characters consistently amusing, director and co- writer Rob Letterman cobbles together an entertaining 90 minutes.

Viewers need only a willingness to have fun and not mind when they realize the movie was never intended to be profound. Full Frontal is merely human, funny and unusual -- and that's enough.

Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall have made as good a film as could be made from the substance of Kyle’s life and career. But greatness was never a possibility, not with a protagonist not all that interesting and with the surrounding circumstances making it impossible to go deeper and risk the movie’s critique of Kyle’s becoming overt.

Foxx's complex performance and the filmmaker's willingness to look at the dark side place Ray safely out of the realm of typical Hollywood hagiography.

Vacation is consistently funny from beginning to end, a piling on of dumb but inventive jokes and excruciating, awkward situations.

For the vast majority of its 113-minute running time, Wonder stays genuine and true.

On Deadly Ground is in every way the equal of Seagal's Under Siege, his first mainstream hit from 1992, and in terms of scale it's even bigger. Everything blows up. Everybody blows up. [19 Feb 1994, p.E1]

Romeo Is Bleeding -- not the best title -- takes chances, and although not all of them work, the film manages the difficult trick of swinging wild while holding together. Part of the credit has to go to the consistently well-pitched acting, by Oldman and Olin and also by the actors in smaller roles, including Annabella Sciorra's quiet but edgy turn as Jack's hard-to-read wife. [4 Feb 1994, p.C3]

The treatment of the subject isn't maudlin, thanks to a witty script and an enormously likable lead character, Remy (Remy Girard), who remains bullheaded and lusty to the finish.

It's an observant and heartfelt film, with turns of dialogue that show that writer-director Josh Radnor really can write.

It's no masterpiece, but it's real.

A good action movie, whose title expresses what is, more or less, a recurring motif. It also gives a sense of the film's general attitude toward life. It's a film with no ambition but to get viewers' pulses moving. It does that, and with a fair degree of wit and style.

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.

To put it into a larger perspective, if Creed III were a “Rocky” movie, it would be up there — nowhere near the original “Rocky” and a little worse than “Rocky II,” but certainly better than the rest of them.

The measure of this kind of movie is its seductiveness, not its logic, nor the ways in which it exploits the supernatural angle, and The Lake House is seductive.

The film is certainly clever enough to hold an audience's interest throughout, though in the end it's a victim of its own ambition. As a moral investigation, it's shallow and ultimately ludicrous.

It's the most tension-producing movie out there right now -- in the best way, it's almost unbearable.

This is a moderately but consistently entertaining film, with but one extraordinary thing about it, which is Saoirse Ronan in the title role.

The film doesn't leave the audience with a moral. It just leaves a sense of having been in the stimulating company of passionate people -- all of them in the arts or on the fringes of that world, all of them struggling to make something intense and amazing out of their lives.

This is a movie made by and for adults, and adults should consider seeing it.

You’ll see lots of movies in 2023, and you’ll forget most of them. But Carmen is so sincerely passionate and peculiar that you’re bound to remember it.

Not surprisingly for a movie of this type, there are lots of scenes of violence, including hand-to-hand combat. The fight choreography is exceptional. In the “John Wick” movies, the violence seems almost like a ballet. Here the fighting is just as intricate, but it also seems like actual fighting, and Hemsworth seems like an actual person who’s doing it.

Hawke is the movie's revelation.

It's a drama with elements of black comedy and suspense, European in feeling but American in attitude. Just for fun, it's set in 1949, an era of glamour, of Hitchcock and of husbands even more clueless than they are today.

It’s still an unusually good picture and worth the time (though you could skip the last 30 minutes and still get all you’re going to get from it). But if only writer-director Ruben Ostlund (“The Square”) had figured out a graceful way to end his movie at, say, the 100-minute point. He’d have had something extraordinary.

Unsane is Soderbergh in his best mode. As in “Haywire” and “Side Effects,” he takes what easily might have been a lowbrow genre entry and realizes it so completely that he turns it into something extraordinary.

This is what makes the distinctly unromantic Cold Mountain' such a breath of fresh air. Its battles are hideous bloodbaths.

Its cinematic stylishness and its attention to modern-day anxiety raise it to something out of the ordinary.

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.

This is the picture the Belgian actor has been waiting for, the step up in class that has seemed inevitable since his breakthrough in ''Bloodsport'' six years ago. ''Nowhere to Run'' is not just a boy movie. Women can enjoy it, too, and Van Damme's boyish good looks and gentlemanly manner -- gentlemanly, except when he's smashing heads -- won't hurt. [16 Jan 1993, p.C3]

There's a lot to appreciate in Street Kings, a tight, propulsive action thriller, but there's one thing to marvel at, and that's James Ellroy's command of story.

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

It's never less than worthy and entertaining, but the importance of Invictus doesn't broaden as it goes along. It narrows.

Writer-director Seth MacFarlane is like some weird combination of a stupid, dirty-minded teenager and a brilliant comic master. His impulses are sophomoric, but he knows where to find the punch line, and he hits it, again and again.

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.

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.

This is like any other Edward Burns film, except for one thing. It's unmistakably better. This is the movie I believe Burns has been trying to make since "The Brothers McMullen," 11 years ago.

The subtlety is the beauty of it.

People take comedy for granted, but to step back and think about Stuck on You is to be impressed by the invention and sheer exuberance of the picture, which isn't great but sure is enjoyable.

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.

There’s no question that John Wick: Chapter 4 is really good for what it is. The only bad thing is what it is.

At some point or another, you will be offended by The Hunt. But see it anyway, confident in the certainty that other people — people you don’t agree with, people you don’t like — will be offended, too.

The movie moves. It has action sequences that are so enormous that they won't just wow audiences, but rock them back in their seats and make them laugh at the audacity of it all.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is probably the best movie so far this year about a kung-fu fighting panda.

The world of this film is like nothing most Americans have seen. But we know what it's about. It's about greed and guilt and how inconvenient it can be to have a soul.

Black comedies are rare enough. Birthday Girl is a member of an even rarer species, the black romantic comedy.

Like the best Marx Brothers films, Brain Donors has gags for the sake of gags. There's no pretense to plausibility. It's just layers and layers of jokes; some work, some don't. [18 April 1992, p.C3]

In a film that easily could have been cold or ironical, Ferrell provides the emotional thrust.

Relies on comic formula -- but does so with more than usual panache.

It took the franchise four tries, but with Expend4bles, they’ve finally made a solid and consistently effective action movie.

The Call might not be a classic for the ages, but for a Friday night? For a movie to take people out of themselves? And to make them marvel at the viewing experience that just happened to them? This one is hard to beat.

American Star is a nice surprise. To hear it described, its premise sounds almost ridiculously predictable: Ian McShane as an old hit man on his last assignment. But the movie turns out to be a serious work that goes to unexpected places.

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

One of the smartest action thrillers to come along in the past few years. It's also one of the freshest.

The picture... is well- made and entertaining, but it holds a special interest in what it says about Hanks.

Beethoven once went five years without composing. Until now, Downey has gone five years without making anything close to a serious movie. The bigger waste of time was Beethoven’s, but talent wasted is talent wasted. This is the type of film Downey should be making.

The writing is subtle and refreshingly without sentimentality — sentimentality being a common flaw in Middle Eastern cinema.

The first measure of Arteta's shrewdness as a storyteller is in the no-fuss way he reveals the nature of the father's business.

The movie is pleasant. It's reasonably funny. But the one who gets the real laughs here, the hard laughs, is Carrey, who plays the kind of role he should be playing - a complete lunatic.

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.

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.

When Travolta plays, everybody has a good time.

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.

Something kicks in about two thirds in, and Far and Away becomes exhilarating. [22 May 1992]

What distinguishes Pattinson in the role is the sense he conveys of someone roiling and churning beneath a surface that is almost, but not quite, calm.

Domingo, who began his career as a stage actor in San Francisco, brings velocity to all the scenes involving the march. He seems unbound, possessed by an understanding that he’s doing something bigger than himself.

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.

Benefits enormously from Aiello's down-to-earth magnificence.

The movie has the wisecracking quality of a Sturges screenplay, but it's warm and heartfelt, too. [13 Nov 2016, p.Q16]

A Hungarian film -- an existential thriller, one might call it -- about an intelligent man who happens to have this lowly nuisance of a job.

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

That Hossein Amini, in his first outing as a director, kept all three of these well-known actors in perfect balance suggests a filmmaker who knows how to steer a performance.

The Post is on safe ground when it focuses on Streep as Graham — tentative, slightly affected, but growing by the day — and with Graham’s relationship with her gruff, hotshot editor, Ben Bradlee, played by Tom Hanks, against type but winningly. The movie’s challenge is the journalism story, which is not as clear-cut as Watergate and is therefore harder to dramatize.

There is history as it's remembered, and then there's history as it happened. This documentary gives us the latter, and it's a true education.

Seducing Charlie Barker is a movie made by people who haven't been making movies, but should be. As in, often. As in, from now on.

Capone is about as demented a movie as you can see right now, and that’s apart from the fact that it’s about a demented person. If Al Capone were ever put in an insane asylum (he wasn’t), this movie could have been made by the guy in the next room.

It’s a good sci-fi action movie, too. Far be it from me to give this movie the kiss of death by making it seem too serious for its core audience. Chappie is everything it has to be — but it’s everything it should be, too.

O has one advantage over "Othello" -- since it's a new movie, not a classic, it has the power to surprise.

The Current War is even better than it has to be. Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung give the film a swooping elegance, so that shots that start as close-ups gracefully glide into medium shots, and medium shots give way to vistas. The camera is always moving in a way that suggests grace and flow.

All of which is to say that, when it’s Hanks steering the ship and fighting the Nazis, it means something extra. It’s not just happening to him, or them, but to us. And so, we can better imagine what it cost those guys, who had to make that back-and-forth ocean voyage in the awful months before their leaders figured out how to sink the U-boats.

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.

John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy directed this fine adaptation of the stage hit, a comedy-drama about a first officer on a cargo ship (Henry Fonda) who wants to be reassigned to combat duty. [05 Jul 1998]

Both women are excellent, and they, as much as the movie's whodunit elements, hold the viewer until the finish.

The saving grace of this French film is that it's anything but a sentimental story.

Fiennes thrives under his own direction, but such is his sense of balance that everyone else thrives, too.

Sad, funny and painfully honest.

Half a good romantic comedy. Luke Wilson is the good half...The weak half is Natasha Henstridge.

Nobody is better than McCarthy at over-the-top comic hostility.

There's something heartening about a film that aspires to do nothing but entertain -- and does.

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

The World's Fastest Indian might be the world's worst title for a charming, slice-of-life biopic.

Miss Sloane is one of the year’s handful of great actress vehicles, and Chastain takes this role by the throat, smashes it against the wall about ten times and then devours it while it’s still quivering. You want to see star acting on a grand scale? Miss Sloane is the movie to see.

Big Miracle is not the most sophisticated adventure film, but compared with most family movies, it's practically something out of Noel Coward.

The Duplass brothers keep making miniatures that contain universes. They seem to be casual, but they're dead serious. They seem to be stumbling around finding stories by accident, but their movies are thematically rigorous. They seem to be presenting matters of little consequence, but the stakes are always huge and life-changing.

As of today, this is the most delightful movie out there.

There’s the sense here that living in a tiny community can either make you bigger or smaller, and in 23 Blast we see both types, from the petty to the stoic and self-reliant.

So this is a good comedy, as bad as it can be and still be good, but good.

It helps that most of Creation is about the relationships - Darwin's with his wife and with his daughter. Even if we resist it, even if we don't want to be dragged in, the story of Annie becomes quite moving, almost unbearable.

The Aviator has a hole in its center, and Scorsese fills it the only way he can, with spectacle. He makes The Aviator colorful and entertaining from beginning to end. There are worse things.

There’s an absurdist edge, but with nothing of the smart-aleck about it. Rather than use wit as a way of bypassing thought and emotion, Bujalski’s concerns are serious, and his attitude toward his characters is warm without being indulgent.

A first-rate action movie, slickly done and with so many imaginative bonuses that, for a time, it feels like a classic in the making. It's not, but it's still solid and entertaining [1 June 1990]

Basically, No Hard Feelings is everything you like about Jennifer Lawrence, brought together in one movie and then magnified: her down-to-earth irreverence, her comic timing, her idiosyncratic naturalness and her unexpected sensitivity.

The chief virtues of Parkland are journalistic in the best sense.

Clearly a minor classic, mainly for reasons besides its crime story plot -- namely, the urbane fatalism of its cast and the overall mood of inevitability that hangs over every scene.

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.

There is no point in discounting smart, engrossing entertainment like The Ides of March, though it's hard not to notice when a film that could have been great falls short.

Haunting psychological drama.

Wildly romantic.

It's refreshing to see a film about nothing but human emotion.

Think of The FP as the occasion for a party. You need to find a room full of people who get the joke and see this movie there, because audiences will be laughing so hard they'll be screaming.

The movie maintains interest throughout and it’s ultimately satisfying, though with one qualification: The last minutes treat the story as though its whole purpose was to illustrate a social and political issue. It’s actually, for 98% of its running time, the story of a person — and it’s better that way.

Ultimately Maiden is very much a feel-good movie, a tale of underdogs finding their strength, combined with a character study and a sprinkling of social history. After the Maiden, women in sailing had to be taken seriously.

Might have been about the rise and fall of a family of gifted children. That would have been the typical way to approach the story. Instead, it's something rare -- a movie about people who have already fallen, whose best days are behind them.

A smart, arch and rather cold-blooded comedy.

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

The latest Audrey Tautou film, Delicacy, is sensitive and well acted and fits under the general category of "good movie," and yet it would be hard to get excited about it.

There's no music to tell you what to think. It's just three good actors and one director's merciless powers of observation.

The subtitle of Hardy's novel was "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented," and that's the approach taken here.

It's a maddening, satisfying, junky, enjoyable picture.

Though the movie has a handful of shots that are downright gross to witness, what makes The Orphanage scary is not what it threatens to show but what it suggests about life.

The Coens, with this film, are like people who fly all the way to Paris on vacation and then eat at McDonalds every night, because that's what they know. Why bother making the trip at all?

Screenwriter William Monahan has fashioned an intelligent and highly topical epic. Director Ridley Scott has brought it home with banners flying.

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.

A half hour before the finish, Margaret loses altitude and starts looking for a place, any place, to land. Instead it crashes, in slow motion. But up until then, Margaret is committed and unusual.

The script is full of off-the-wall lines that take you by surprise but are perfect. [21 Aug 1987]

The dialogue stretches are just pauses between the action scenes, where the director gets to show her stuff. [12 July 1991, p.F1]

If you partake of the Marvel universe, this movie is for you no matter what. And if you don’t, seeing it would be like going to church if you’re an atheist — an experience of spectacle unmoored from any purpose or definition. In the case of “Endgame,” we’re talking fine spectacle, to be sure, the best that money can buy. But all the same, this one is strictly for the faithful.

This film is the closest we're going to get to anything new by Williams, and it's a respectable effort.

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.

This is a movie in which the audience knows half the gags in advance, but thanks to director Dennis Dugan's timing and Farley's execution, the audience doesn't just laugh anyway, but laughs harder. Knowing in advance is part of the fun.

'Night' is the kind of horror movie where a zombie puts his hand through a window, grabs the hero's face with a decayed hand and fellows in the audience laugh, knowingly. The laugh I can understand. The "knowingly" part I don't even want to think about it...As horror movies go, it's a little better than average. [22 Oct 1990, p.F1]

This is a decidedly blue-state take on a red-state phenomenon.

An elegant and rather even-tempered documentary.

Madagascar isn't deep and would have no business being deep. But that it keeps one foot in reality is enough to keep us guessing.

Fortunately, Arbid didn’t want to make a movie about crazy people or about people going crazy, so she pursued a third option: She made the woman interesting. So “Simple Passion” is a movie about something that, sooner or later, happens to lots of people, but the fun of this story is that it happens to someone we want to watch.

It moves, makes us care and involves us in the genuine drama of two young people trying to heal themselves. The austere beauty of the locations doesn’t hurt either.

The documentary is not always fascinating, but Tuschi's ultimate thesis - that Khodorkovsky, who started out a shady businessman, ultimately emerged as a hero, willing to go to jail for his convictions - is a persuasive one. Clearly, the man is a political prisoner.

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.