Mick LaSalle

A masterpiece.

Everything Melville shows us, he shows us for a reason, and these reasons are never obscure but are rather pertinent to the action and to the moral movement of the world and the characters.

Every year, we get only a few of these, movies that come out of nowhere, that are different, unexpected and wonderfully right. Moonlight is that kind of movie, one of the gems of 2016.

Structured like a 17th century comedy of manners, the picture is a social critique of the idle rich that's part comic and part tragic, that's light and airy and yet haunted with meaning. [08 Feb 2004]

It turns out that Pepe Le Moko is even better than "Algiers."

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

It’s a great film, but it must be added that it’s also an entertaining film. That is, it’s not at all a chore to sit through. People not only appreciate the film, but also enjoy it — though it’s a sober kind of enjoyment, given the subject matter.

Seeing it is a time-bending experience, a way of visiting the past and glimpsing the past's idea of the future. A masterpiece of art direction, the movie has influenced our vision of the future ever since, with its imposing white monoliths and starched facades.

An admirable film, not a great one -- yet. It drags a bit.[Restored version]

First, this movie should be enjoyed. Later, marveled at. And then, once the excitement has faded, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days really should be studied, because director Cristian Mungiu creates scenes unlike any ever filmed.

Loses steam only when it strays from the sisters and attempts to depict their parents' loveless marriage.

Brando's performance is so idiosyncratic -- the nasal delivery, the muffled diction and, of course, the screaming, ''Stel- lahh!'' -- that it's easy to forget its technical brilliance. But from Brando's first scene he exudes menace, even while talking calmly. His eyes always on the lookout for some slight, Stanley is ready to lash out every second he is on screen. He's impossible not to watch -- he's too odd, too dangerous. [Director's Cut; 11 Feb 1994, p.C3]

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

A worthy, fascinating film..

12 Years a Slave has some of the awkwardness and inauthenticity of a foreign-made film about the United States. The dialogue of the Washington, D.C., slave traders sounds as if it were written for "Lord of the Rings." White plantation workers speak in standard redneck cliches. And yet the ways in which this film is true are much more important than the ways it's false.

Affleck is magnificent, but the movie is something less than that, because it can’t completely overcome some built-in challenges.

When it's good, it's good, and when it fails, it's still clear what Levine was trying to do.

See Gravity in theaters, because on television something will be lost. Alfonso Cuarón has made a rare film whose mood, soul and profundity is bound up with its images. To see such images diminished would be to see a lesser film, perhaps even a pointless one.

An ungainly masterpiece, but Chaplin's ungainliness is something one can grow fond of.

But make no mistake, whether the movie is fair or horribly unfair - I know nothing of the actual facts and can't make that determination - its portrait of Zuckerberg is a hatchet job of epic and perhaps lasting proportions.

There are many great acting moments in this film, but you should especially savor the final shot, the long close-up of Haenel in profile. Put simply, it’s why we go to the movies.

What keeps I Am Not Your Negro just short of greatness is, alas, the competition from Baldwin himself. Watching it, it’s hard not keep wanting to see more of Baldwin and hear less of Jackson.

Amour is also unforgettable and one of a kind, two hours of torment that, in the end, you will probably not regret.

This one enters the pantheon of great American war films.

This is the legal movie that lawyers most often praise for its realism, in terms of not only story but also tone and atmosphere. It's full of great scenes. [08 Apr 2012, p.P19]

It is an exhilaration from beginning to end. It's the movie equivalent of that rare sort of novel where you find yourself checking to see how many pages are left and hoping there are more, not fewer.

One of the most innovative and best made films of the past year. Every now and then, even Dick Cheney gets to like a great movie.

For its look and its innovation, and for its ability to suggest shades of feeling with a minimum use of intertitles — and as a classic of the first order — Sunrise must be seen.

In this one masterpiece, Federico Fellini achieved the ideal balance -- between social observation and unconscious imagery, between artistic discipline and freedom, and between the neo-realism of 1950s Italian cinema and the orgiastic flights of his later work.

In the moment, it's intermittently transcendent, heartrending and beautiful ... and busy, repetitious and boring.

Haynes elicits two great performances and provides the perfect frame for them, not just in terms of setting, but through smart casting and attention to the smallest of performances.

The latest in the wonderful "Before" series does three important things: It breaks out of the courtship formula, yet retains the series' quality, and it moves the lives of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) forward in ways that are satisfying and believable. True, a romance you once envied might now be a relationship you'd not want to be in, but as long as Celine and Jesse are still talking, there's hope.

It’s one of the best war films ever made, distinct in its look, in its approach and in the effect it has on viewers. There are movies — they are rare — that lift you out of your present circumstances and immerse you so fully in another experience that you watch in a state of jaw-dropped awe. Dunkirk is that kind of movie.

45 Years is very much an English film and in the best sense. It’s subtle, understated and ultimately devastating, but only if you’re paying attention.

Its deeply anarchic sensibility has kept Taxi Driver fresh all these years. [20th Anniversary Release]

The Irishman is all about the end of something. It is to gangster movies what John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” was to westerns. Without a doubt, it’s a masterpiece.

Captures the flavor of putting on a show on Broadway.

The not-as-good news is that, like “Wall-E” and “Up,” Inside Out has a great opening, a satisfying finish, and something of a sag in the middle. But this time it’s only a sag.

There is no turning away from the screen.

Welles is lovely in the film, open and vulnerable, and Keith Baxter as Hal is quite good. [28 Sep 2016, p.Q39]

Though an estimable success overall, The Return of the King has several scenes too many and too great a concentration on battles.

Armie Hammer’s performance is a brilliant exercise in subtlety, suggesting a genial yet inappropriate space-taking, the carelessness of the beautiful.

It’s a beautiful and hopeful film, coming at a time when there isn’t much beauty or hope in our movies, and it’s the type of picture — a sprawling, exuberant musical drama — that hasn’t been seen in decades.

Petite Maman immerses the viewer in all the things you might have forgotten about childhood — what’s funny to a child, what’s valued, what’s priceless, what will be remembered and valued in years to come. Just watching the almost-identical Sanz sisters play and interact becomes fascinating, like witnessing from the outside some lovely and enclosed world.

This is warm and intuitive work, striking that elusive balance between inspiration and control.

Uncut Gems remains, from start to finish, a tale told about an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. By the time it’s all over, nothing is exactly what you might feel. But Sandler and Fox give it the humanity the Safdies wanted there. The movie needed it and got it from the actors.

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?

Anderson almost brings off a picture worthy of his grandiose ambition.

Spotlight one of the best movies about journalism ever made, at once gripping and accurate. It doesn’t just get the big things right, such as how news stories evolve, but the small things, such as what offices look like and how staff tends to react to a new boss.

By the end, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly achieves a victory over difficult material, but celebrating that fact doesn't preclude recognizing the story is not a natural for movies and remains an uneasy match.

This is the most realistic film about teaching that you're ever likely to see.

Feels positively Greek in its magnitude, a lament about fate, age, time and life.

This is an excellent comedy, and the fact that it's made by a filmmaker with even better movies on his resume is nothing to hold against it.

The results in an experience that is smooth sailing for the first 45 minutes, but then hits a slog that goes on for another 40, before the movie revives again in its last half hour. Obviously, a film can’t be great if you spend 40 minutes wishing the thing would end already. A 95 minutes, The Florida Project could have been a masterpiece.

You have never seen anything like this.

Spielberg's sledgehammer way with emotional moments, never more obvious than here, kills some of the pleasure for adults and robs the movie of the ultimate laurel -- classic status. [2002 re-release]

Can and should be appreciated as a work of delicate and unmistakable beauty.

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.

Gets it right. It's a wonderful movie. Watching it, one can't help but get the impression that everyone involved was steeped in Tolkien's work, loved the book, treasured it and took care not to break a cherished thing in it.

Maybe Glazer’s movie will be of use to people naïve enough to believe that nobody without horns and a pitchfork can be the devil. Everybody else will learn nothing from this film.

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.

Toy Story 3 is a better film than "Wall-E" and "Up" in that it succeeds completely in conventional terms. For 103 minutes, it never takes audience interest for granted. It has action, horror and vivid characters, and it always keeps moving forward.

Ferocious brutality is presented without commentary or judgment, yet with unmistakable moral understanding and vision. [21 September 1990, Daily Notebook p.E-1]

It's an endurance test. Though never boring, the movie is a fairly long slog through the snow.

One of the best crime dramas to come along in years.

A poignant, quirky and effective alternative to the usual soulless, computer-generated summer fare.

Almost too much to bear. But brace yourself and see it anyway. It’s worth it.

The story is too slender for its two-hour running time, and the pace is lugubrious, as though everyone in front and behind the camera were depressed. But the biggest obstacle is the protagonist (Joaquin Phoenix), who is almost without definition.

So the most noticeable thing about the first minutes of Greta Gerwig’s new screen adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott classic is that the women in Little Women seem just a little bit snooty here, more like privileged actresses from 2019 than like a Northern family living in genteel poverty during the Civil War.

You don’t see many sci-fi action extravaganzas that are about late middle-aged disappointment, about wondering what it’s all about and whether any of it was worth it. It’s this element that gives The Last Jedi an extra something, a fascinating melancholy undercurrent.

But it would be a mistake to leave the impression that the rewards of They Shall Not Grow Old are in any way akin to that of the usual BBC historical documentary. There is some overlap, to be sure, but by and large this Peter Jackson film does not offer a historical encounter, so much as an encounter of humanity, a psychic linking of hands across time.

Baker is concerned with people who are broke and on the outside (“The Florida Project,” “Red Rocket”), and while there are aspects of “Anora” that make us aware of the distance between people born with everything and those born with nothing, he doesn’t let politics or economics dwarf his characters.

It’s a bit crazy, wild yet precise, a mix of comedy and drama that feints in the direction of anachronism, even as it provides a grand showcase for Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone and Olivia Colman, who are extraordinary.

Until this film, these Shin Bet directors had never consented to an interview. Now that they've spoken - and have said the unexpected - we can only wonder if their words will have an influence.

Magnificent but somewhat frustrating movie.

The film has the measured and expansive quality of real life, which could have been dull. It’s anything but that. Instead, by making Julie so real and vivid, Reinsve and Trier accomplish something rare. They make everything that happens to her feel as interesting as if it were happening to you.

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.

This is a rare film and a rare use of cinema. Other documentaries are like filmed news stories. This one is like a poem. If you see this, you will never again think of hearing in quite the same way, and you will hear sounds that are so haunting that they will be with you for the rest of your life.

It's a movie filled with surprises, including one outright kick in the head that qualifies as one of the biggest movie moments of 1992. [18 Dec 1992]

With Reichardt, you really do feel like you’re actually there. The only problem is that, a lot of the time, you’re really not happy to be there.

Yet all this wit and effort and occasional beauty is in the service of a movie that is little more than a two-hour chase scene, one that seems founded on the assumption that if you show one set of people chasing another, that’s enough to get an audience excited: Oh, no, let’s hope they don’t get caught!

An absolute delight, combining the cheap thrills of a biopic with the gentler, but more lasting, pleasures of a brilliant character study.

With any other actor, All of Us Strangers was bound to be an emotional film, but Scott has a way of going down to the nerve endings. He makes the movie into something raw and deep.

Make no mistake, Blue Is the Warmest Color constitutes a breakthrough, in addition to being the best film of 2013.

It's a humane and witty treatment of an average life that, incidentally, speaks to the worth and inherent drama of average lives.

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.”

There's no point complaining that Honey is a tired reworking of an old formula, because it's intended for a young audience that doesn't know the formula.

Green Border has the directness and truth of a documentary and the emotional immediacy of a narrative feature.

If his two previous films suggested a director dipping a few toes in dark waters, Un Prophete marks the moment when Audiard took the plunge.

In Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan takes an eggheady topic and, without insulting anyone’s intelligence, turns it into a gut-level experience. He shows that the kind of hyper, jacked-up, ultra-modern filmmaking associated with the action and superhero genres can be harnessed in the service of a smart, serious movie.

Polish actress Joanna Kulig has been waiting for years to show what she can do, and in Cold War she gets the chance. She takes the role of a lifetime between her teeth, chomps on it, pounds it into the ground and never lets go for a second. Ferocity and intensity are present in every moment of her performance, even when she’s contained. With Cold War, Kulig breaks out as a lioness of international cinema.

Married to the Mob picks up pace throughout and builds to an exciting finish. [19 Aug 1988]

In 1925, Charlie Chaplin released "The Gold Rush," his best film to date and one of the best he would ever make - or anyone would ever make.

There's just nothing artful about it, and it's Greengrass who deserves the credit. These nonactors don't act the way most people do when playing themselves. They act the way people do when they're being themselves.

American Hustle is David O. Russell's best film, one that finds him in that ideal zone of spontaneity and complete control.

It's striking how much emotion Satrapi is able to convey through blocky drawings.

The thinking is shallow. The emotions are tepid. But the creativity is dazzling. If that sounds like a slam, consider that most Hollywood screenplays are predictable, rote and functional -- and those are the good ones, folks.

So in-depth, so appealing, so easy to sit through and so anomalously grand scale that few who see it will ever forget it.