Mick LaSalle

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that conveyed with such vividness and precision the helplessness of childhood.

Far superior to its companion piece, "Flags of Our Fathers," released earlier this year, "Letters" is a grim and humane film that has to be counted among the director's better efforts.

I lost patience with a widow who is grieving one month and then making out with a guy in a bar the next. This is an emotional recovery even Hamlet's mother might have found unseemly.

Anomalisa may simply be a brilliant one-off, but it’s pointing a new direction for animation, if anyone cares to follow it.

The 1931 version, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, is the standout, featuring two great performances, one by Fredric March (who won the Academy Award for the title role) and the other by Miriam Hopkins, as Ivy, the lovable trollop. [28 Dec 2003]

The movie is funny, definitely funny. But underlying the humor is a vision so bleak, so despairing and so utterly hopeless as to make "No Country for Old Men" almost look cheerful.

A triumph that goes well beyond Hoffman's tour de force performance.

A unique and hilarious British comedy.

The movie represents a leap forward for writer-director Martin McDonagh. Three Billboards is as clever and imaginative as McDonagh’s “In Bruges,” in terms of how it makes characters collide in delightful and unexpected ways.

Hardly a riveting experience. It has slow patches, but it has a cumulative effect, thanks equally to Hansen-Love and Huppert. We come away feeling enriched and expanded, without exactly knowing how or why.

That perception of Fiennes and Gustave is central to the whole enterprise. Without it, the movie just breaks off and flies away. But with it, The Grand Budapest Hotel becomes something wonderful.

There is plenty that’s wrong with it, and there’s plenty that’s right with it. But the truth is, in the moment, no one is balancing pros and cons. I just loved it. It’s a film that combines an overall feeling of modernity and relevance with the glow of old-time glamour.

"Human Resources" was a good, straightforward tale, but Time Out is better. It's haunting. It's like a poem.

Hopkins makes himself transparent. He lets us see both who this man was and what he is now. There’s dignity in the crumbling facade and child-like terror in the eyes — and a warning to those who’ll be lucky enough to live so long.

There's such a thing as smart angry, and such a thing as stupid angry, and after seeing Inside Job, audiences will be smart angry.

What keeps us glued to our seats are a series of unexpected plot turns, little and surprising story moments that create curiosity and sometimes anxiety. Just as one of these elements resolve, Almodóvar presents another, so that there is no point in Parallel Mothers at which the audience can become bored or complacent.

Has some great movie moments but also boring stretches.

The verdict is sad but unavoidable. Poor Things is a 141-minute mistake.

Chadwick Boseman commands every moment of this film, radiating probity and purpose, and it’s only later on that you realize that, with another actor, this wouldn’t have been a sure thing. The Black Panther is a superhero with lots of uncertainty.

The magic of Brooklyn can’t be analyzed, but something in the richness of its relationships puts an essential truth before us — the brevity and immensity of life. We know all about that, of course, but that’s the beauty of great art: It takes what you already know and makes you feel it.

So what's wrong with Joshua? Two things: The audience is ahead of the movie, and the movie never catches up.

Yet as ridiculous as Hefner's life sometimes seems, he has been an exemplary citizen, as this documentary by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Brigitte Berman spells out.

This is the world through the idiosyncratic eye of Cassavetes, which is both all-forgiving and inexhaustibly, passionately nosy. [28 Jun 1991, p.F8]

An outstanding effort that maintains the integrity and purpose that distinguished "The Fellowship of the Ring."

Perhaps because Jenkins can’t translate to the screen the incisiveness and music of Baldwin’s prose, he brings on real music from other sources. Over and over, and increasingly as the movie wears on, Jenkins drowns his film in mirthless jazz and pop interludes to the point that the action feels stuck in cement.

This is a remarkable feat, not only of cinematography, but of choreography. Just to film Michael Keaton and Edward Norton walking down a Manhattan street, everything had to be timed as in a dance — when the camera swirls ahead, when it goes behind, when it swoops back around. It’s all accomplished so smoothly that it would be worth doing merely as a stunt, except this is no stunt. This method carries the mood and soul of one of the best movies of 2014.

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

This expands an already long movie to more than three hours, but this time there's no getting enough of a good thing. [2002 Director's Cut]