Mick LaSalle

So, Dogman is a strange case: Great actor, great character, but a story that’s like an overstretched anecdote infused with art-film portent.

From the outside, Sunshine sounds like the most boring film on Earth. In fact, it's glorious.

The films never lose sight of Mesrine the man, a fascinating character in that he's brutal yet extremely intelligent, has a skewed but discernible conscience, and, under the right circumstances, can be warm and generous.

This is all good movie material, so far as it goes ... but Get on Up can't go any further. Sometimes damaged people stay damaged, and sometimes popular artists make their contribution and then stay in one place forever. It's a big letdown for everybody, but in a biopic, it's poison.

Yes, eventually, after about 100 minutes, it does default back to the usual nonsense, of protracted superhero battles in which no one can get hurt, and of commotion that makes a movie screen seem like a very big computer monitor. But until then, Shazam! is sensitive, imaginative and funny, with a good story and a smart premise.

Almost all of its screen time is taken up with explosions, chases, shootouts, heads coming off, folks getting sliced in half -- and the odd thing about it is that after 40 minutes, it's not disturbing anymore. Just dull. [21 Nov 1990, p.E1]

Often the picture drags, getting caught in its own goodness and going for a generalized sense of wonder, till you kind of wish you could apply the spurs. [17 Sep 1993, p.C3]

Best of all, there's just the pleasure of seeing something that's both fantastic to the eye and emotionally dimensional. This is how to make action movies.

Talk about disturbing.

A modest but charming romantic comedy.

Cate Blanchett has the title role, and she does wonders with it, bringing a degree of passion but also suggesting something essentially unevolved in Charlotte's character.

It commits the only crime that can be committed against Shakespeare: It makes him boring.

A charmer, a movie whose embrace of cinema is so passionate it could be mistaken for an embrace of life.

The Optimist could be described as a Holocaust drama, but it approaches that history in an unexpected way.

Reveals one mystery, only to reveal another that it can't quite penetrate.

The fine quality of the new film is good news for anyone disappointed by "Star Trek Generations," which got the new "Star Trek" feature film series off to a shaky start two years ago.

Cohn was a strange mix of self-aggrandizing and self-loathing, or maybe that’s a familiar mix. In any case, he emerges from the film partly sympathetic, if only because he seemed so miserable all his life, but mainly as the prime example of what Shakespeare meant when he said, “The evil that men do lives after them.”

After two hours of The Walk, I felt as if I’d walked the wire myself. I was agitated and exhausted. During the movie, I was squirming and wincing, and a few times even had to close my eyes, just to find some relief.

The treatment of the subject isn't maudlin, thanks to a witty script and an enormously likable lead character, Remy (Remy Girard), who remains bullheaded and lusty to the finish.

For people already interested in fashion, the film’s appeal will be obvious, but Dior and I deserves to go beyond a small target audience.

It’s an inward-looking film that seems to be saying something about life. Whatever it’s saying — and it’s not clear that it’s saying anything specific — it connects. It’s not just another good movie. Somehow, it all adds up as something more important.

The Ghost and the Darkness could have been an effective film about the virtues of courage for its own sake. But the picture is too lightweight, too posturing and too self-important to go in an introspective direction.

Still, as Dylan biopics go, this is probably the best imaginable.

My Penguin Friend is what you’d expect from an animal picture, except that it’s better — lifted by a smart script, sensitive direction and a truly beautiful performance by Jean Reno.

Compelling.

I Care a Lot is notable for its colorful supporting and featured roles — Chris Messina as a mob lawyer, Peter Dinklage as a Russian mobster and Eiza Gonzalez as Marla’s girlfriend. But the main attraction is Pike, who doesn’t try to make us like her. She commits to the character’s nature and holds us with her honesty, her intensity and her unmistakable pleasure in getting to play someone appalling.

I hated this film. I hated every minute of it, and at times it even made me angry.

Even if you’d never in a million years want to ride with these guys, “The Bikeriders” makes you understand why they wanted to ride with each other.

Liotta's acting can't redeem senseless violence.

More than one joke or one idea. It's a thoroughly satisfying comedy --and a respectable space adventure, as well.

Muddled and endless.

I've seen many films about Italy, but this one - possibly because it's so colorful and stylized and possibly because the songs are such economical distillations of a state of mind - feels like being there.

Going after one innocent man was bad enough. Going after another constitutes a pattern. This marshal isn't a hero. He's a menace.

The film's freedom and control, its inspiration and focus, announce it as the work of a confident and mature artist.

If Public Enemies lacks anything, it's something audiences can't legitimately expect to find: a certain EXTRA something.

To the extent Final Portrait succeeds, and it does intermittently, it’s a rather deadpan comedy about two men trying to understand each other against a cultural and generational gulf.

The movie’s one flaw, a notable one, is that the first hour is better than the second. The first is jaw-dropping. In the second half, the film slow downs somewhat, but by then, the audience is hooked into the movie’s reality, so there’s no turning away.

Angourie Rice, who plays Gosling’s intelligent and highly moral 12-year-old, deserves a special mention. The character is an unexpected presence that adds dimension to the story, and Rice plays her beautifully.

There’s a nude scene that comes out of nowhere that’s almost embarrassing. Why is it there? Like the movie itself, it’s almost daring, except it’s not.

Its take on the political scene is unsophisticated, and its humor heavy- handed. Like any satire, it exaggerates, but it exaggerates the wrong things. [11 Sep 1992, p.C1]

While Wilde captures its subject's singular charm, it ultimately doesn't do justice to his complexity.

It’s an engaging product, typical of its era and elevated by Crosby’s non-singing breeziness and Astaire’s all-around brilliance, plus the appeal of Marjorie Reynolds, who has to pretend that she’s enthralled every time Crosby warbles something in her direction. Now that’s acting.

The movie's excruciating length is without dramatic or thematic justification.

A fascinating fact-based portrait of a gambling addict.

As Zimbardo, Billy Crudup adopts an implacable facade, and for a while we don’t know what we’re seeing — a humanitarian on the brink of discovery, an ambitious monster who has found the winning ticket, or a young professor in way over his head.

It doesn’t ascend to the sky. It’s not profound or great. But Vigalondo takes Colossal to all sorts of unexpected places and then brings it home, intact.

Mainly Blank City shows a succession of engaging, intelligent, middle-aged people showing some very bad home movies that they once hoped were something more.

Not only more crazy than “Reservoir Dogs,'' but it also feels more real. [1 Jan 1993, Daily Notebook, p.D1]

The movie's pleasures are acting pleasures, but the movie doesn't compel attention and never seems like more than the frame for a performance.

The film doesn't leave the audience with a moral. It just leaves a sense of having been in the stimulating company of passionate people -- all of them in the arts or on the fringes of that world, all of them struggling to make something intense and amazing out of their lives.

The main pleasure of Sword of Trust is in watching an ensemble of expert comic actors play off of each other. The movie was improvised, based on a tightly constructed story, and every scene has some comic jewel in it, some unexpected touch or moment.

Sad, funny and painfully honest.

Most viewers will have no more fun watching this story than the characters do living it.

A rambling documentary that freely moves back and forth through time but maintains interest and cohesion by virtue of its subject. The more you watch Lewis, the more fascinating he gets.

Has the usual overlong running time, the half-hearted feints in the direction of human feeling and the obligatory action sequences that are big without being either exciting or particularly legible.

An intelligent movie that portrays the mighty without reverence.

A hit-and-miss affair, or, to be more precise, a miss (story one), hit (story two) and break even (story three) affair.

It wimped out by blanding down the story and the characters to the point where she isn't really a shrew and he isn't really a maniac.

Wood is superb at delineating Tracy's slide into desperate incoherence, but equally impressive is Reed, who has to conceal her writer's intelligence in playing a character who's entirely instinctive and unreflective.

It takes an extraordinary film on the order of Joyeux Noel to make it all suddenly vital, immediate and human.

Intends to inspire outrage, and to an extent it succeeds.

The best glimpse yet of what it's like to be in Iraq.

Pedro Almodóvar is one of the few filmmakers with the ability to infuse the screen with his own consciousness, and to see The Skin I Live In is to enter into his nightmare.

An engaging romantic comedy that's deeper, smarter and more pessimistic than it appears at first glance, a film with shrewd insight into the mysteries of human attraction.

This world of entirely nice people seems like a trite fantasy — trite because the movie never makes you believe it. But it does makes you want to believe it, and so, like a lot of these movies, it takes you halfway there.

The best aspect of “A Hero,” and probably the aspect which Farhadi would most like us to contemplate, is the internal journey of Rahim, who, over the course of his difficulties, slowly and belatedly seems to come into his manhood.

There seems to be something about the story itself that's better suited to the stage than the screen.

A sturdy and sophisticated crime drama from the Philippines that takes a pretty gruesome situation and enriches its presentation with lots of human detail.

An occasionally powerful, yet occasionally frustrating documentary.

Director Stephan Elliott too easily buys into the drag queens' conception of themselves as valiant pursuers of illusion, without ever questioning the value of the illusion being pursued.

Though it never runs out of gas or even shows signs of sluggishness, del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” runs out of importance about a half hour before the finish. But it’s still an entertaining movie by a distinctive filmmaker.

A personal story with broad implications for the culture as a whole.

A balanced examination of the reasons for the electric car's disappearance, reasons that include corporate collusion and greed, governmental spinelessness and oil company propaganda -- but also consumer indifference and the limitations of the vehicles themselves.

Glorious moments aplenty despite director who's just in the way.

A completely appealing, beautifully preserved memory piece - a grand, colorful coming-of-age story with a candy box color palette and a standout performance by Renée Zellweger. It's a great story and a great crowd-pleaser.

The bottom line with Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights is that the writer-director has taken Emily Brontë's tale of undying passion and rendered it passionless.

"Bombshell” tells the story of a triumphant and consequential life. And there’s more: Everybody interviewed on camera about her apparently really liked her, especially her children. That’s no small achievement.

Bottaro finds ways to dramatize chess, and the environments are fascinating throughout.

The best thing Harrelson brings is his own sweetness of disposition, which somehow never goes completely into hiding.

Easily could have been mildly funny and phony but instead is really funny and true to life.

This is an embarrassing film. It's a sex comedy that sets itself up as a satire of middle-class mores, except there's no truth behind any of its observations. LaBute tries to be shocking and manages only to be shockingly puerile -- tasteless in a high-school-boyish sort of way.

It’s a good film, very unlike most “disease of the week” pictures, in that it’s often quite funny, and it tells a fascinating story about something that remains mysterious to most people.

Late Night is a fairly agreeable experience, and every time Thompson is on screen, there’s a reason to keep watching.

City Slickers is a funny and affecting comedy, with wonderful jokes and a script flashing intelligence in every direction. [7 June 1991, p.E1]

Does a beautiful job of capturing that mood -- the exuberance and wistfulness of one man's last year of youthful irresponsibility before joining the rat race.

The best teenage werewolf movie ever made.

Like all great works of art, the story’s point has resonances beyond its era and even beyond the specific subject of gay people, generally.

The Current War is even better than it has to be. Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung give the film a swooping elegance, so that shots that start as close-ups gracefully glide into medium shots, and medium shots give way to vistas. The camera is always moving in a way that suggests grace and flow.

The Old Guard shows that, in the hands of a smart writer and director, something can be made of it that’s worthy of our attention. This genre can grow. Let’s hope it does.

A film for anyone who enjoys an intelligent thriller, but for illness phobes this movie is a special pleasure in that it presses all the right fear buttons even as it validates a very particular vision of reality.

An unflinching and historically rich rendering of an amazing story. He has made what is easily the best American film so far this year.

An empty exercise.

The picture, which marks the debut of Mexican film maker Guillermo del Toro, is a dull hybrid - a ponderous art film crossed with a vampire story. [06 May 1994]

Fortunately, the movie gets a huge lift from Johnson, who reappears in the second half of the film and rescues it from nonstop boys’ hijinks. It’s not enough to say the camera loves her. Put Johnson in a close-up and the rest of the movie disappears.

A small, independent comedy-drama that does a number of things very well. It does them all quietly. The scenes don’t swing for the fences. The emotional work is true, not pushed, and by the end, the movie ends up giving the sense of a world.

Truth or Dare is like a detective story. You try to infer the truth by looking between the frames. The picture we get of Madonna is a contrived one, but it's revealing anyway, because it's the one she wants to present. [17 May 1991, p.E1]

It’s amusing to see what Ozon is up to, but the central character and her problems remain simply matters of curiosity mixed with indifference.

Summertime is the first movie ever like Summertime, and on that basis alone, we should appreciate it.

What makes Aloft better than dismissible is that it’s a sincere failure, not a cynical one, and the cinematography is arresting. In fact, for scattered seconds throughout the movie, Aloft is beautiful to look at.

Joachim Trier is a Norwegian filmmaker who made a strong debut in 2011, with his film, “Oslo, August 31.” Louder Than Bombs is his first English-language effort, and it’s disappointing.

In addition to being funny and endearing and having a lively script and lots of nicely observed performances - is something of an education.

As a piece of filmmaking, the trick of Operation Varsity Blues is that it provides first-rate entertainment even as it incites sputtering rage.

It exemplifies the same appealing style, which strives to show life as it's lived and people as they really talk and act.

Feels positively Greek in its magnitude, a lament about fate, age, time and life.

A gentle comedy, offbeat but never cute, never lewd and never going for shortcut laughs that might diminish character.

Lacks one thing -- an epic grandeur.

The movie's strength is that it makes us want to know more about Levitch, and we pay attention as the tidbits are dropped -- that he's from a middle-class Jewish family in upstate New York, and that he did time in prison. The movie's flaw is that, having gained our attention, it fails to tell us what we want to know.

It's not enough to say that Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino's best movie. It's the first movie of his artistic maturity, the film his talent has been promising for more than 15 years.

In the end, the best thing about The Dragon is that it will make people want to go out and rent ''Enter the Dragon.'' [7 May 1993, p.C1]

It's a rare, beautifully made movie that offers you another world. [23 June 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

It's a film of unquestioned visual artistry, and the filmmakers' empathy and human understanding are apparent moment to moment, scene by scene. But despite sensitive performances, it's an experiment that fizzles.

Long before the finish, Man From Reno has flat-lined.

In terms of story and emotional power, Brave comes up short.

The lively setting helps, but the main attration here is the familiar story, which has been around forever and yet never gets old.

The picture is crammed with shameless satire, engaging moments of pure silliness and jokes that border on the outrageous. It combines relentless energy with an aura of good nature for a formula that works.

The best American film of 2008.

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.

Nothing in the story feels specific to that California city, or emblematic of it.

Though the film contains renditions of many of the big hits, they’re so badly performed you’d have every right to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Here's the tricky thing about The Strangers. Sure, it uses cinema to ends that are objectionable and vile ... but it does it well, with more than usual skill.

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.

This is one of the funniest movies of the year.

More than confusing. It's opaque.

The year's best romantic drama.

Adapted by Caitlin Moran, from her own semi-autobiographical novel, it’s both a dead-on take on what it’s like to be a young critic as well as a smart movie about class and 1990s culture.

Almost single handedly, [Louis-Dreyfus] muscles “Tuesday” into the territory of being worth seeing.

Charlotte Rampling goes for broke as a sexually rapacious older woman. So does Ally Sheedy as a rich woman. They're memorable, and yet equally satisfying is Ciaran Hinds' sadness and restraint as a paroled sex offender with deviancy in the blood.

To extend the boxing analogy, it's as if Morris, after getting pummeled for 12 rounds, just taps Rumsfeld with his finger - and scores a knockout.

Directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West, the team behind the Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary, RBG, the film makes the case for Child as an instinctive feminist and a profound cultural influence, who transformed how and what Americans ate in the second half of the twentieth century.

A corny, overblown romance, and while it eventually wins you over with its atmosphere and good nature, it's far from the masterpiece you've been hearing about. [15 Jan 1988]

Bana is rock-solid throughout, able to convey sensitivity and moral probity through a not quite impassive facade — never overdoing it, never underdoing it — and yet fulfilling his duties as the movie’s locus of feeling and meaning.

If you want to know what a culture thinks it thinks, watch drama. But if you want to know how it really thinks, watch comedy. Watch, for example, Blockers, which is exuberant in its crudeness and coarseness. It’s where comedy is now, and it’s very funny.

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.

No classic, but neither was the original starring Burt Reynolds. Instead, it's an odd mix of amusing nonsense and nastiness that chugs along, hit and miss, until the last section, which is the best part of the movie and its real reason for being: the game.

Joel Edgerton, who wrote and directed, co-stars in Boy Erased. Edgerton casts himself as Sykes, who runs the conversion program, and he couldn’t have found a better actor for the role.

This is a tale from the front lines, before the disease had a name, through the early days when no one knew for sure how it was transmitted.

Joy Ride feels like it easily could have been better, but it’s certainly good enough, and it might be remembered as an early milestone in some significant careers.

Pay attention to the camera, and you will see that Polanski is a clinician. He is in the thrall of no one.

This is a good movie for Hamm, and also for Pike who, in her recent films, has too often been either a madwoman or a victim of circumstance (and sometimes both). Here she gets to be active and think on her feet, and it makes a big difference.

If the movie has a weakness, it’s that Zohar gets the most screen time, though she’s the least engaging character.

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

The film is a showcase for a talented ensemble of Black actors, not the least of whom is Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Doaker, an older, mellow wise man.

Exactly one minute longer than its predecessor, but it's a dragged-out exercise, with no epic scale and no spirit worth talking about.

A curious thing about "Revenge" is that auto executives who might have been portrayed as villains in Paine's earlier documentary are likable characters here.

Rodman can't act, but his outsized personality fits right in. Van Damme, as always, does his job and looks good doing it. As for Rourke, he's taken the first step. Now he just needs to rinse and repeat.

From moment to moment, Rumours is almost entertaining. But for it to work, you pretty much have to root for it. The movie invites you not to enjoy it so much as to appreciate the effort.

An intelligent, well-made film about a seemingly well-adjusted, likable and loquacious woman.

The Trip to Greece isn’t nonstop hilarity, but if you get into the rhythm of it, it’s laidback and pleasing. It’s an enjoyable trip in good company.

Faithful but not slavishly faithful to the source, the movie retains most of the songs but streamlines the story, particularly in the second half.

Inventive and intermittently amusing.

Unless you're a fan of Fishbone, Everyday Sunshine is probably just a documentary about a band you've never heard of, whose music you probably will not like. But there's a bigger and more interesting subject at work in this film. It's a movie about what it's like to almost make it in the music business, but not really, not quite. It's about coming close and watching it slip away.

The movie captures something that we missed on this side of the Atlantic. The British public’s obsession with Diana was unrelenting. Every move she made became occasion for analysis — most of it idiotic — on the endless string of talk shows they have over there.

Befuddling.

An agony of bad plotting and whimsical, lifeless scenes.

This is a bad film by a good filmmaker. It has the veneer of substantiality, but it’s unsubstantial. It is the product of sincere conviction and artistic confidence, but both were misguided. Every filmmaker needs to take the occasional chance, as Christopher Nolan did with “Tenet.” Not all chances pay off.

An attempt at an epic. Sayles assembles a big cast and creates a mosaic of interweaving characters and story lines. But the stories are bland, the connections are incidental and the dramatic payoff is nonexistent.

It’s innovative and exhilarating at times, and then innovative and oppressive and relentless and repetitive and tiresome, but it’s never exactly boring. People will walk out of Climax, not for lack of interest, but for lack of endurance.

For all its faults, some of the action scenes in The Rookie are spectacular. [07 Dec 1990, p.E1]

As a film, The Birth of a Nation is raw and ungainly, but it’s definitely alive.

That irresistible thing - a movie about the making of a movie - combined with a bit of a history and a political message.

To be sure, The Death of Dick Long is a weird one, in that it starts out intense and gradually loses steam, until nothing really matters and the audience might as well leave. This movie could be used in film schools to teach how not to structure a story.

Trumbo is breezy and pithy without ever undercutting the seriousness of the subject. A certain degree of wit is appropriate in a writer’s story, just as any Hollywood tale must at least have a whiff of absurdity, or else it can’t be true.

As played by Douglas, he is a man with a free flow from his spirit through the instrument. It's instinctive. He becomes involved with two women, and this is where the movie could become hokey, but it doesn't. [12 Jun 2005]

Yet it fails to enchant for a reason that might not be fair, but that's just how it is: We've seen outer space simulated so well in sci-fi movies that the real thing seems like old stuff.

The Coens, with this film, are like people who fly all the way to Paris on vacation and then eat at McDonalds every night, because that's what they know. Why bother making the trip at all?

Sally Potter's twin interests - in grand world movements and in the grand internal movements in people lives - are effectively brought to bear in Ginger & Rosa, her best film of the decade.

There's nothing like a good story, and The Galapagos Affair: Satan Comes to Eden has a great one that grabs viewers from the first minute and holds on for two solid hours.

Live Flesh lacks freshness.

So the bottom line: This is an undeniably effective movie that I mostly enjoyed, even though I’m not altogether sure it should ever have been made.

The result is a film of sadness and power, the first great 21st century movie about a 21st century subject.

It's nothing you'd ever want to put yourself through twice, and yet it's effective in the moment. Shrewdly prefabricated and yet lovingly assembled, it is, in short, the most beautifully made cynical thing I've ever seen.

An interesting movie that doesn’t completely satisfy, but its central character lingers in the mind.

Watts is the movie's soul, thoughtful and deep-revolving.

Though the film makers would probably like us to regard Guncrazy as a commentary on alienation in the '90s, in the end the picture isn't about much more than its own style. But this commitment to style and the movie's peculiar emotional honesty make it more than a self-conscious genre piece. [05 Feb 1993, p.D1]

Young Benny has a nice smile, and she and Jack seem like pleasant people, but in the end (and in the beginning and in the middle) it's hard to get worked up about them.

The word "delightful" is thrown around so much that it often means nothing. Movies that truly have the capacity to delight - that amuse and lift the spirits and create a warm feeling - are rare. Romantics Anonymous is one of those rare delights.

The movie's effectiveness is distorted by its hero-worship of the Chicago defendants.

It boggles the mind that after six years of silence, all Tarantino has to offer is this garbage.

This is what Hopkins has been showing us for decade after decade: the deepest, rawest and most tortured feelings of private, dignified men. His is nothing less than a glorious cinematic legacy, and the miracle is that he keeps building on it.

Everyone in the movie is excellent, everyone is tonally spot-on, and no one has a single bad moment – which is another way of saying that Clea DuVall, best known as an actress (“Veep,” “Argo”), is a real director. She has made one of the best Christmas movies of the millennium.

A sly comedy starring Henry Kendall and Joan Barry, about a newly rich couple who go a little crazy on an ocean liner. The witty script was co-written by Alma Reville, Hitchcock's wife and lifelong collaborator. [18 Feb 2007, p.26]

There are turns and twists and multiple dashes of the unexpected, and it is all impressively arranged and justified.

By end of Cha Cha Real Smooth, you feel like you’ve met some people, and you liked them all, and it all felt true. For a 24-year-old filmmaker, that’s not bad.

Can’t we just stipulate that everything that Greengrass is saying is right, and then go see “A Star Is Born” again? Can’t we give ourselves a break?

Even those who despised the original novel should not have trouble stomaching Bridges, while the novel's fans will find the film -- despite some additions -- generally true to what they perceive to be the book's spirit.

Modern film noir done with flair and commitment.

Harris saw this brave new world more than a decade ago - and liked what he saw. To watch We Live in Public is to wonder if the world we live in is just a reflection of one man's neurosis - if Harris's mix of emotional distance and rabid self-promotion has simply gone viral.

Watch Infamous on its own. It's a worthy film in its own right, with its own virtues.

With Star Trek Beyond, the rebooted “Star Trek” franchise that features the original crew of the Enterprise, settles into routine sequel territory. This isn’t terrible news, and it may have been inevitable, but it’s something of a letdown all at the same.

It's striking how much emotion Satrapi is able to convey through blocky drawings.

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.

In the end, what makes Equity an intelligent and honest movie keeps it from being a total crowd-pleaser.

It's refreshing to see a film about nothing but human emotion.

The story is fluff, but it's mostly appealing.

One of his better efforts, not up there in the Vertigo-North by Northwest-Psycho stratosphere, but a cut above his competent thrillers such as Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur and Lifeboat. [19 Dec 2004]

It's amazing how far a movie can go on nothing but speed and directness.

Men will watch Crazy, Stupid, Love thinking they're finding out things about women, but if anything, this movie works the other way. Women will get a glimpse into the male mind.

It has scale, spectacle and a cast of good actors who seem to believe in what they’re doing. But the movie springs to life only in spurts.

The narrative doesn’t generate much interest; the nature of the ultimate ending is discernible from a distance, and the movie’s message about nature and the natural order seems forced. Still, there’s a lot here that’s impressive. Lamb is too vivid and original to forget.

Refreshing and worth seeing.

Yet Apocalypto has to be respected for the sheer audacity of it, for the commitment and ambition behind it, and for its presentation of a complete other world. It is the furthest thing from a cynical or casual piece of work. It's crazy, and it moves.

It's funny, broad and never stops moving. It's made to please, and succeeds.

Two things to know about Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: It is appalling. And I haven’t laughed this hard at anything in months.

Writer-director Lorene Scafaria based the movie on her own mother, and the clothes that Sarandon wears in the film actually belong to Scafaria’s mother. They fit Sarandon well, and so does the role.

The World's Fastest Indian might be the world's worst title for a charming, slice-of-life biopic.

This documentary is not just interesting, but timely.

The film occupies that peculiar space that many of us would prefer to believe doesn’t exist, a movie that’s worthy but often inert, by turns enriching and enervating: a good boring movie.

Henry Fool is far and away writer-director Hal Hartley's best movie.

It is a very good performance in a very bad movie.

For all the movie's richness and dazzle, for all that money dripping off the screen, Batman Returns is a gorgeous failure -- flashy, intermittently appealing but, in the end, a big mess. Batman Returns lacks a coherent story. It lacks a point of view and a focus. And so everything suffers, even the art direction. [19 June 1992, p.D1]

Monster House was designed as a family movie and a scary movie. It may scare children, but it won't terrify them. So it's no scarier than it should be.

Either Shelton knows this world well, or he's such a great bluffer it doesn't matter.

A few times every year, Hollywood makes a mistake, violates formula and actually makes a great picture. Falling Down is one of the great mistakes of 1993, a film too good and too original to win any Oscars but one bound to be remembered in years to come as a true and ironic statement about life in our time. [26 Feb 1993, p.D1]

Needless to say, if “Inglourious Basterds” and “Django Unchained” were too much for you, The Hateful Eight won’t be any easier. This is a big step beyond.

For all the movie’s honesty, the reality of Alzheimer’s disease is a lot worse than what you see in Still Alice. Perhaps directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland made a calculation as to how much an audience can take. They were right.

Deerskin is funny, weird and original; it features two charismatic stars, and it does everything it needs to do in only 77 minutes.

Lyne has always gone the extra step, and Deep Water shows that he hasn’t lost his touch.

A rich and elegant film, full of sly, devious characters with complicated motives.

Jennifer Aniston...doesn't have much screen time, but in playing this slightly insecure, affable young woman, she does her best film acting to date.

In the end, Homeroom lacks impact, taken as a whole, but anyone who sees it will derive something from the experience.

The story is minimal, just a series of events in the life of a young man and his circle, but every scene is rendered with such authenticity that it’s riveting, almost like it’s a privilege to be stepping back in time.

A story of courage and sacrifice, as well as a moving love story that’s really three love stories in one.

Some people may be put off that For Your Consideration lands in a serious place. But I see it as evidence of an expanding vision, of continued artistic growth.

So much love went into Hustle & Flow that it almost glows with it.

In place of the tension, climax and easy resolution of the old "Perry Mason'' show, A Civil Action offers murkiness, bitter successes and frustration.

Jewell is not just a man, but a type, and his story is a warning, not just about the excesses of power, but about our own reflexive assumptions. Paul Walter Hauser gives us the soul of a man that deserved respect even before he did something heroic, but one that people might never have noticed.

A movie about serendipity and spontaneity.

To make a movie about that team and those games requires more than an ability to depict personal dramas or re-enact game highlights. It requires the re- creation of a world and a mind-set, and Miracle accomplishes both brilliantly.

The result is not only entertaining but also refreshing, a shameless crowd-pleaser with a healthy cynicism about itself.

Because “Leave the World Behind” is weak and unconvincing when it comes to character interaction, the film drags in the moment-by-moment, despite its stellar cast.

“Popstar” has more going for it than outrageousness, though it certainly has that. It has genuine outrage, a good-humored but clear-eyed take on today’s pop culture as a morass of corruption, idiocy and relentless self-promotion.

Suffice it to say, the issues here are bigger than one woman's story.

As is often the case with Farhadi’s films, Everybody Knows progresses as though nothing special were happening, and yet it’s all very interesting, anyway.

Its story meanders and doesn't build, and the pace is deadly.

A modest documentary, small in scope and ambition, but it achieves one of the higher callings of art in that it forces viewers to look at a something in a newer, deeper and more humane way.

Over the last few years, the Avengers, together and separately, have spawned a number of good, very good, or reasonably entertaining movies. But with Avengers: Infinity War, the Marvel Comics franchise arrives at the stage of decadence. There’s just too much of it. A victim of its own success, there are just too many appealing characters here to stuff into one story.

It’s giving away nothing to say that the answers here are a mix of good news and bad news.

Sometimes I Think About Dying is a good calling card for Ridley, who proves that she’s not limited to playing spunky adventuresses from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Rather, she has a compressed intensity that could be put to good use in a variety of roles.

Chef is the best thing he (Favreau) has ever done, as writer or director or actor. It's the sort of thing of beauty that filmmakers are ultimately remembered for.

Dream Horse is full of heart and interest. Throughout, Collette makes us believe in the human-animal connection between Jan and Dream Alliance, which is touching, mysterious and deep.

It's hard to dislike a picture with flying cows and oil trucks.

It is not what could be fairly called a bad movie, but neither is it fine enough to be a good one, with its lineup of dull characters and a limp story that functions like a conveyor belt.

It's hard not to come away in awe of a director in complete control of every frame.

Qualifies as a mild success. It's an easy picture to like, even if it's not exactly satisfying.

A bright young actress, a movie-star actor and a potentially interesting concept gets smothered in 128 minutes of colorful, empty nonsense.

An entertaining film, but also an uncompromising one. It is harsh and not particularly hopeful, and it presents a situation so tangled and contorted, with so many interests in collision, that a lasting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians seems a distant prospect.

Taken a little too seriously, My Cousin Vinny can be seen as a celebration of the breadth and richness of the American landscape. Maybe the movie isn't exactly about that, but to enjoy it is, in a small way, to celebrate that richness. [13 Mar 1992, p.D3]

The movie is overplotted, a soulless maze of special effects and relentless action.

Craig leaves the series in a mammoth, 163-minute extravaganza that audiences will be enjoying for decades. It’s a lovely thing to see.

The subtlety is the beauty of it.

It’s definitely not for everybody, but even a non-fan stumbling into the theater accidentally will find whole sections here to enjoy.

At its best, Mermin -- who used an all-female crew -- conveys the sense of an entirely feminine world being created under the beauty school roof, and it's refreshing.

Some of the segments are more successful than others, yet all of them have the haunting quality of a completely insignificant event that someone might remember years later. Night on Earth tries to stop the clock and cast a net over the whole mystery, and while the film never loses its humor, the wistfulness, yearning and deep affection at its heart is are unmistakable. [29 May 1992, p.D1]

It’s hard to say what McCarthy intended with “Brats,” but he ended up making a cautionary film for journalists. As such, it may have a limited audience, but if it’s seen by the right people, it might do some good.

Just Mercy isn’t the best movie that could have been made from its subject, but it’s good enough.

Those of you who don't work for a newspaper may also be interested in what it's like on the inside - how stories are generated, how editors and writers interact, etc. For what it's worth, it's an accurate portrait.

The movie drags.

Klapisch's masterstroke was to place at the center of a movie a man, forced by circumstances, to stop and simply observe.

What audiences want when they go to a suspense thriller.

The documentary takes Tower through his much publicized recent stint as the chef at New York’s Tavern on the Green, a rather hopeless assignment for a perfectionist.

The fortunate thing about for Inequality for All is that, for all its good information and useful insight, it also has an appealing person at its center: Robert Reich, the economics expert and Berkeley professor who was also the labor secretary under Bill Clinton.

An enjoyable farce, with lots of laughs and a strong cast. At 80 minutes long, it's that rare case of a short film that should have been longer.

This is pure entertainment but smart entertainment, plotted and executed with invention and humor and acted by a winning cast radiating good-movie energy.

One great monster movie. [11 June 1993, Daily Notebook, p.C1]

Neighbors is funny for all 96 of its minutes, not counting the credits, and it contains the single best sight gag of the year so far. (We're talking laugh-out-loud funny and then laugh again later, just thinking about it.)

Noah is no silly action blockbuster with a Biblical pretext. Rather, it's the product of writer-director Darren Aronofsky's vigorous engagement with the Biblical story and what it might mean in our time.

As writer and director, Cronenberg devises for himself a compelling situation, but a situation is not the same as a story. Within 20 minutes, Cronenberg has written himself into a hole, one populated entirely by passive characters who do nothing but get cut up or watch other people get cut up.

As a Nicolas Cage movie — not just as a movie, but as a vehicle for what a specific actor can do onscreen — this is the most interesting thing Cage has done since “Face/Off.”

Black Widow is what happens when movies abandon human values for the emotional deadness and emptiness of the superhero movie.

What it's really about - and this sounds so boring, and so nothing, when in fact it's really rather wonderful - is people. Just regular people, a mother and daughter, whose lives are observed with economy and precision, and with an eye for the telling detail and the tense, revealing moment.

Domingo, who began his career as a stage actor in San Francisco, brings velocity to all the scenes involving the march. He seems unbound, possessed by an understanding that he’s doing something bigger than himself.

Though it ultimately recovers, too much of The Good Thief forgets about Bob, and in the process the movie loses much of its allure and vividness.

With any other actor, All of Us Strangers was bound to be an emotional film, but Scott has a way of going down to the nerve endings. He makes the movie into something raw and deep.

Scorsese stuffs the film with heavy-handed art direction and piles on a ludicrously ominous soundtrack. The soundtrack is a constant reminder of the movie's importance and only highlights its unimportance.

At 2 1/2 hours, Gladiator is a long ride, but it doesn't drag.

Moon is boring. Agonizingly, deadeningly, coma-inducingly, they-could-bury-you-alive-accidentally boring.

Still, those who meet the movie on its own terms and don't expect a masterpiece may appreciate the commitment of Wright and the actors. Blanchett goes out of her way, for example, to be repellent here.

Band Aid is her (Zoe Lister-Jones) first film as a director — she also wrote and stars in it — and something about her and this film is really appealing.

Deserves to ride the wave of the latest, hottest micro-trend in pictures: the romantic comedy for guys.

The film itself is wretched. A grueling, numbing black hole.

If “Dead Man’s Wire” has a weakness it’s that it doesn’t create an intense desire to find out how it all turns out. It compensates with dark humor and with a central performance by Skarsgård that’s fascinating.

Avatar: The Way of Water is a one-hour story rattling around in a 192-minute bag.

The most refreshing thing about Summer of Sam is that it doesn't try to impose a moral or define the limits of its story.

The film is a fascinating look at how a true event can become a media event — and how courting the media can have good and bad results so mixed up that it’s hard to know where the good influence stops and the corrupting influence starts.

Fascinating in its depiction of presidential leadership in action.

A ghastly sequel to a charming animated film.

A hard, funny and realistic movie about the future.

With her first feature, "Manny & Lo," writer-director Lisa Krueger reveals a distinctive style. Though employing no surreal devices and remaining within a realistic convention, Krueger takes the story of two young sisters on their own and somehow makes it seem unreal, strange, outside time.

There are great movies every year, but every so often there’s a movie that’s not only great but new, that advances the form a little, that pushes movies to a different place. Such movies get remembered as the thing that happened in cinema that year. The thing that happened in 2018 is Vox Lux.

Witty and lively, with a soul to it, as well.

It’s imaginative and even brilliant at times, and then it starts to cave in. But then we think no, maybe not, maybe everything’s going to be made right . . . until it collapses completely. A cynical, smart movie about the dangers of mass culture gives way to a sentimental embrace of the very thing it’s criticizing.

There’s a mood, a feeling about life, that pervades Nocturnal Animals, one that’s expressed in visual terms.

The smarter way to make this movie would have been to edit out everything extraneous to the story of Xavier and Wendy. They're the soul and heart of the movie, while everything else is pretty much dead weight.

The Well Digger's Daughter is old-fashioned in the best sense, almost cozy in its conventions.

No, T2 is not a great film, but its pleasures are great — and so rare and accomplished that they raise T2 to a level approximating greatness. There is something to be said for a movie this enjoyable. T2 is great enough.