Mick LaSalle

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San Francisco Chronicle
For 3,800 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Mick LaSalle's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Sound and Fury
Lowest review score: 0 Nightbreed
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,063 out of 3800
  2. Mixed: 1,037 out of 3800
  3. Negative: 700 out of 3800
3800 movie reviews
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Mick LaSalle
    Human Resources
    A rare film about the class and educational divide that can happen even within families.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 25 Mick LaSalle
    Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
    [Pedro Almodovar] gives it a nice try, but his approach turns out to be completely wrong for the material he's working with here. [25 May 1990]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Mick LaSalle
    Lorna's Silence
    Ultimately, this is not one of the Dardennes' masterpieces. They've made a few of those, but the effect of Lorna's Silence is more modest. It leaves the audience with neither a sense of uplift nor devastation, but, rather, with something more akin to intellectual appreciation.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Mick LaSalle
    Two Brothers
    The result is schizophrenic, an uplifting film that's truly depressing, a movie about cruelty that tries to be fluffy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Mick LaSalle
    Clouds of Sils Maria
    It’s not a combination most of us would’ve thought of, but Stewart and Binoche bring out the best in each other.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Mick LaSalle
    Coraline
    What a shrewd achievement for writer-director Henry Selick ("The Nightmare Before Christmas"), to have made a movie that everyone will acclaim as beautiful, when perhaps the most beautiful thing about it is the sheer ugliness of it all.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Mick LaSalle
    The Old Man & the Gun
    It’s hard to imagine anyone in this role but Redford. Without him, there would be little here worth seeing.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Mick LaSalle
    The Other Side of the Wind
    To be clear, there are dazzling sequences in The Other Side of the Wind, and virtually every minute has something interesting in it. It’s absolutely worth seeing as a curiosity. But as a work of narrative art it doesn’t sustain itself for its full two-hour running time. After an hour, you might even have to struggle to stay awake.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Mick LaSalle
    Cow
    It doesn’t make cows into human beings. If anything, for some 90 minutes, it turns us into a cow. In doing so, it shows us — in a way that we actually feel it — how amazing it is to exist.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Mick LaSalle
    Rocky Balboa
    Anyone who appreciates Sylvester Stallone or enjoys the "Rocky" movies will find moments to enjoy in Rocky Balboa and will leave the theater reasonably satisfied. It's just good to see the guy, and it's good to revisit the character. And that's everything good to be said for the experience.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Mick LaSalle
    Frost/Nixon
    Morgan finds the right elements of action and character through which to make history leap off the page.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Mick LaSalle
    The Dancer Upstairs
    An ambitious political thriller, a multilingual film of mood and texture and the occasional haunting image.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 25 Mick LaSalle
    Flirt
    [Hartley] changes the script enough so that the integrity of his experiment goes out the window. But he doesn't change enough so that the narrative can have any suspense.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Mick LaSalle
    Wildlife
    Wildlife isn’t dazzling entertainment but an intelligent, low-key and satisfying film with a rare respect for every character.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Mick LaSalle
    The Piano Teacher
    Powerful and outrageous.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Mick LaSalle
    Eddie the Eagle
    Maybe it’s unfair, but I came away feeling cheated by Eddie the Eagle. It’s a jolly real-life tale about an underdog who made a splash at the 1988 Winter Olympics, and it does make you feel good, but it turns out that the film’s story is 90 percent fiction.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Mick LaSalle
    The Sessions
    The Sessions is moving. At times, it's even erotic, which is unexpected, to say the least. It sends viewers out of the theater with a heightened sense of the physical and a real feeling for all the things that sex means in human life.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Mick LaSalle
    Dinner Rush
    Benefits enormously from Aiello's down-to-earth magnificence.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 25 Mick LaSalle
    Annihilation
    Thinking people also like a little drama with their science fiction. On that score, Annihilation comes up short.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Mick LaSalle
    An Unmarried Woman
    This is the defining feminist film of the decade and one of the most important women's vehicles in popular American cinema. [15 Jan 2006, p.28]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Mick LaSalle
    Red Rock West
    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]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Mick LaSalle
    Hotel Rwanda
    An extraordinary and effective film.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Mick LaSalle
    Sleeping with the Enemy
    Sleeping With the Enemy is bound to be a crowd pleaser, with its cool, crazed villain and with Julia Roberts in the lead, as a woman who fakes her death in order to escape her husband. But everything surprising and gripping about the movie happens in the first 20 minutes, and after that it follows a predictable course. [08 Feb 1991, p.C1]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Mick LaSalle
    Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
    It's one of the best documentaries ever made about show business, about what it really consists of and what it demands.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Mick LaSalle
    Baran
    Can and should be appreciated as a work of delicate and unmistakable beauty.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Mick LaSalle
    Coriolanus
    Fiennes thrives under his own direction, but such is his sense of balance that everyone else thrives, too.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Mick LaSalle
    For Greater Glory
    If For Greater Glory were a person, it would be wearing two different socks. It is a scattered mess, as earnest as a folk song, but like a folk song that goes on for two hours and 23 minutes. Not only does it never justify its epic length, it gets even the small things wrong.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Mick LaSalle
    A Most Violent Year
    As a great New York story, it’s also a great American story about ambition and failure, about the kind of people who make it, the kinds who don’t, and all the things that can go wrong.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Mick LaSalle
    I Am Love
    I Am Love casts no spell and creates no narrative urgency. It's as compelling as mildly interesting gossip about people you don't know.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Mick LaSalle
    Gone Girl
    Gone Girl is a great thriller until it stops being one, about 20 minutes before the finish. Until then it’s brilliant, not just a triumph of story but of strategy, a movie that keeps the audience grasping and reaching in all the wrong directions, while consistently delivering something a little better, a little crazier and a little more disturbing than expected.
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