Mick LaSalle

The Assistant isn’t a particularly enjoyable film, but its message and quiet power linger for days.

If you see the movie, notice how the ending is no ending, and the fact that it even feels like one is entirely a function of Michael Giacchino's musical score.

Much of the film is so wrenching there's no time for idle thoughts.

At its slowest, the film has value as a historical document. At its best, the film gives a human face to stories of unimaginable suffering and unexpected triumph.

Riveting.

It’s a deep and moving investigation into one woman’s inner struggle as she goes about looking for true love.

It's a slow-moving fable, with enough story and substance to make for one amazing Imax short. Instead the material is stretched beyond its limits into a long, repetitive and often stagnant 127-minute feature film.

In “France,” Dumont has not created a commentary on modern life, so don’t approach the movie looking for that. He’s made a movie about the consequences of modern life for one person, a portrait of contemporary mores as seen from the inside.

Washington delivers not only one of the year’s best performances, but one of the best self-directed performances in cinema history.

The most glaring problem here, and the one hardest to explain, is Soderbergh’s failure to elicit any warmth or charm from Zoë Kravitz, who has been consistently appealing in her every other screen performance, from blockbusters like the “Divergent” series to little independents like “The Road Within.”

In any case, Puzzle ends strangely, in a way that’s not clear what the filmmakers intended or how we’re supposed to feel about it. It’s entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional.

Conclave is a fascinating drama about the personal and political machinations involved in the selection of a new pope. If a bunch of cardinals filling out multiple ballots over the course of several days doesn’t exactly sound riveting to you, prepare for a surprise.

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

Argentine filmmakers Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn (who wrote the film in collaboration with Duprat’s brother, Andrés) direct Official Competition with a sophisticated understanding of its tone, which is essentially realistic and deadpan. The world isn’t crazy, just the people in it.

Never takes off, but it never collapses. At times, it becomes frustrating -- for example, about 30 minutes are spent pursuing a lead that goes nowhere.

Priscilla could be described as the story of how the virginal wife finally got a clue, but it takes her too long. We’re left with a movie that mostly consists of a confused woman-child stumbling around a mansion in high heels.

There's a lot of bad hair and incoherent, drug-addled remarks, but inside a minute we get the joke, and it isn't much.

It's excessive and psychologically imprecise, coarse where it should be refined and too much like a David Cronenberg horror movie in places where restraint and intellectual rigor are called for.

Ultimately, Black Bear is about the price of art — not only the price the artist pays, but that the people around the artist end up paying, unwittingly. Yet in the actual experience of it, the movie doesn’t feel so lofty. It just feels tense and disquieting, like a thriller. In that sense, it is a thriller, but one of the emotions, and it’s riveting every step of the way.

With “A Real Pain,” Jesse Eisenberg has invented a new genre we can call “the Kieran Culkin movie.”

The movie asks us to wonder what’s real and what’s false, and what it all means. But it goes on for 134 minutes without ever giving viewers a reason to keep watching. Few Netflix customers will make it all the way to the end, and even fewer will be glad they did.

Like the best wines and the best films, there’s a complexity to the finish, so that it reverberates with meanings beyond the obvious. Indignation has the disconcerting quality of truth and is an altogether adult piece of work.

Neither does it help that, despite the wit and literacy of Enough Sad, its form is straight out of a teen romance: A cool kid starts dating someone less cool, and then engages in some elaborate deception that, if found out, will threaten the progress of young love. The funny thing is, if Enough Said were converted wholesale into a high school romance, the characters' behavior might ring more true.

I’ve been fascinated by McCartney for decades, and “Man on the Run” made me feel like I was getting closer to understanding the real guy.