Mick LaSalle

There may be better examples of cinematic art in 2013, but for a good time at the movies, it's hard to imagine anything beating this action extravaganza, from director Roland Emmerich, about a very Obama-like president.

The finest American Westerns have a characteristic that 3:10 to Yuma shares. In a way that's almost mystical, they suggest a truth beyond the specifics of the tale.

A breakthrough for McCarthy and a highlight of the movie year.

This is human drama at its most intense and universal. This is the rare film that can change the way you think and see the world.

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

Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind captures that special quality that Williams had, the extra quality that went beyond the laughs, that communicated his whole being.

More than on "Prime Suspect," more than any film in recent memory, Le Petit Lieutenant conveys the relentless toll of big-city police work.

The actors keep their clothes on, but everything else is naked in Like Crazy, a romantic drama that makes other romantic films look obvious and calculated in comparison.

It’s Lively’s movie, and it’s she who kicks this superior thriller up an extra notch, to the point that it’s not only worth seeing for the excitement and thrills, but for her.

Writer-director Caroline Vignal could have made "My Donkey” into a 90-minute monologue, with Antoinette talking to the donkey. Instead, there’s lots of variation, smart turns of story and well-drawn, well-defined characters. Vignal makes even the bit characters, the ones with just three or four lines, vivid.

It's that rare kind of movie that comes along only a handful of times each year -- gut-level entertainment that's oddly profound.

There’s something so deeply right about this movie, so true to the time depicted and so welcome in this moment; so light in its touch, so properly respectful of its characters, and so big in its spirit that the movie acquires a glow.

Either Live Free or Die Hard will go down as the summer's best action blockbuster, or it's going to be one exceptional summer.

In color, style and humor — even in its graphics and editing — it’s very much like a Godard film from the mid-1960s. Thus, the experience is like watching an actual Godard film — the first great Godard film since “Masculin Féminin” in 1966.

Don’t mistake his movie’s lack of sentimentality for callousness. Babylon is coarse, hard and wild, but its emotion is undeniable. Babylon is what movie love really looks like.

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

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.

The most coolheaded of the Iraq war documentaries, the most methodical and the least polemical. Yet it's the one that will leave audiences the most shattered, angry and astounded.

So comically fertile and yet so grounded in the reality of its characters that it's really a kind of marvel.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man is one of Chevy Chase's best movies. Though more or less a comedy, the picture gives Chase a chance to do much more than smirk and be a wise guy, while providing a good showcase for his dry style of humor. [28 Feb 1992, p.D1]

Stuns with writing, acting, direction.

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.

The complexity, richness and fullness of what Leo does here is acting at its most illuminating and useful.

One of the most incisive and perceptive Hollywood films about Hollywood.

If you liked Whitney Houston before, you’ll like her even more after seeing this. You’ll also admire her and feel pity for her and feel frustrated by her.

Benedetta continues Verhoeven’s strong run with as good a movie as he’s ever made.

The film documents how Lucy used her clout to get her husband cast as her co-star. It was a way for them to see each other. The rest is history, but a really interesting history.

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.