Mick LaSalle

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.

Has a slow build and a strong payoff, but George Clooney is the element that holds it together.

The first great Hitler movie.

The mysteries of Dolores Claiborne are never gripping enough to consume an audience, and there are few, if any, surprises along the way. But the women are wonderful and reason enough to see the picture.

One of the consistent pleasures of Knives Out is that, while its style evokes an earlier era, the script is very much a witty response to today’s world.

The hardest thing to describe is tone, but it's the thing that most sets Killer Joe apart and makes it one of the most interesting and satisfying movies of the year so far.

Original, truthful and moving.

One of the nicest things about Hearts Beat Loud, and there are several nice things, is the way that Offerman and Clemons seem like father and daughter. This is the work of the actors, but also of the director.

It's the picture that proves action films don't have to be silly, that a few thrill sequences don't mean every other value has to be shot to pieces.

Later, as the picture becomes a Petrie dish in which James' theories are put to the ultimate test, Certified Copy loses some of its magic, but it retains interest as an appealing and one-of-a-kind experience.

As for Fraser, his clumsy humanity is endearing, but by now, assuming he has invested wisely, he should have enough money saved so as to not have to waste his talent anymore.

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

A tennis match can be a personal battle, a clash not only of athleticism but of mind, and Guadagnino gives every game and set the gravity of gladiatorial contest.

To be sure, Steve Jobs has its own integrity as the story of the young innovator, but it’s a little like making a movie about Thomas Edison and stopping somewhere between the phonograph and the lightbulb.

There is no diverting from strict chronology, no point the documentary wants to make that requires moving forward and back through time. It just inches ahead, one year to another, sometimes one day to another. By the middle, each time a year changes, it's a relief.

Someone should steal this concept and make a decent movie out of it.

Kaurismäki stalwart Kati Outinen, as the old man's silent and ailing wife, is the key to the movie, even though she appears only sporadically. Something in her timid, understanding and impassive gaze, which is Kaurismäki's gaze as well, lets us know that she sees things in the old man that we don't see.

Here and there, there are moments when the energy dips, but what carries the film from scene to scene are the truthful performances and the genuineness of the storytelling.

Trust never lives up to its snappy opening. Everything is tongue-in-cheek here - yet it's never remotely clear what the point is or what's getting satirized. [16 Aug 1991]

In the end, Da 5 Bloods feels like a clumsy hybrid of two fine impulses — to make a heist movie set in Vietnam, and to make a statement about race in 2020. Alas, each intention doesn’t serve the other, and so both go unrealized.

The story here isn't much, and the truth it reveals, to them and us, isn't earthshaking, just quiet and somber.

At its best, the movie expresses an affection for dogs and is very much attuned to what is wonderful about dogs and what’s funny about them — their sincerity, their credulousness, their odd tendency to get nervous over nothing and yet to occasionally remain oblivious to real threats.

A complete bust, but the ways in which it fails are interesting.

Convoluted.

Not a heist film, a thriller, a twisted romance, a film noir or a character study, but a unique concoction that bends all these genres to its vision.

Lindon is a strong, sensitive actor, heir to the stoic French working-class tradition of Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura. And not enough can be said for Kiberlain, an actress willing to be seen in all her ranges.

Rhys Ifans is an engaging protagonist, playing Marks as a passive and seemingly unflappable character whose iron nerve and ability to keep cool in a crisis get him out of more than one desperate situation.

We end up with a movie in which it becomes very possible to respect the intent and yet be frustrated by the result.