Mick LaSalle

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.

Maestro exposes a truth about marriage that I always knew but could never quite articulate: To be truly known and understood can actually be scary.

Saltburn is a remarkable combination of smart and stupid. Its problem is that it’s superficially smart and deeply stupid. It’s clever and amusing in 20 different ways, but when it really matters, it descends into ridiculousness.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes has an overwrought title, but it’s the best movie of the film franchise.

May December is light and amusing, but also profound and serious. See it once — and then think about it for a long time.

The film starts off akin to a tongue-in-cheek “Twilight Zone” episode, then becomes a meditation on fame before transforming into a scathing satire of several things at once: Gen Z, cancel culture, and even the people who complain about cancel culture. Written and directed by Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli, it’s bleak and funny and provides Cage with his most satisfying role since 1997’s “Face/Off.”

Thankfully, the movie clocks in at a mere 105 minutes. The Marvels doesn’t have much to say, but at least it says it quickly.

This is a rare film and a rare use of cinema. Other documentaries are like filmed news stories. This one is like a poem. If you see this, you will never again think of hearing in quite the same way, and you will hear sounds that are so haunting that they will be with you for the rest of your life.

Stallone, often tortured in his movies, is cinema’s most tortured optimist.

It takes about half the movie, but gradually we realize that we’ve stumbled into something wonderful, that there’s magic happening here, both onscreen and within the lives of the characters.

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.

Emily Blunt is so emotionally present that she almost redeems the movie. She doesn’t, but she at least makes the first half of Pain Hustlers watchable.

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.

For le Carré fans, The Pigeon Tunnel is a must-see, but the film will also be useful to people wanting an introduction to his work.

The Persian Version tries to pivot and fashion itself as a celebration of women’s strength across the generations, but it’s transparently something else — a daughter’s attempt to come to terms with a problematic mother. And it’s an effort in which there can be no suspense because Keshavarz’s strenuous effort to whitewash mom tells us that the movie, and the relationship, can only resolve in one way.

Here and there, there are moments when the energy dips, but what carries the film from scene to scene are the truthful performances and the genuineness of the storytelling.

The movie explores the real essence of determination, and it’s not what people imagine as they recite affirmations to themselves. Nyad shows us determination almost at a level of pathology, as a single-mindedness that could be considered sick, except that Nyad wasn’t delusional about her capacities.

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a bladder-buster of a movie with no obvious bathroom break, no section where the story starts to sag. This makes it, almost by definition, a good and admirable piece of work. But Killers of the Flower Moon is also a lumbering mess, an ungainly and tonally odd film that, for all the strength of its parts, has little cumulative impact.

In The Burial, every character gets a chance to shine, but not like in a “Star Trek” movie, where Sulu gets his moment and then Chekov. Rather, it all feels natural and organic. There’s something almost philosophical in a directorial point of view that understands that supporting and featured players are just as human as the main characters.

The bottom line on Joan Baez I Am a Noise is that if you absolutely love Baez and her work, you will find nothing here to challenge your preconceptions and will probably learn some things you didn’t know. But if you’re merely Baez-curious, this documentary will not satisfy and might even make you less curious.

It would be easy to dismiss Foe as a lugubrious downer, except that the reality of its world feels palpable and that marriage seems real. I believed Ronan and Pescal as two people bound up in love, shared history and torment.

For all the movie’s modest but palpable virtues, The Exorcist: Believer has one problem it cannot solve: No one has come up with a new way to do an exorcism.

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is tasteful and restrained, and though it was made by someone known as a wild man, there’s no grandstanding here. The performances are modulated, not pushed. If anything, the viewing experience is like being a fly on the wall of a real court-martial. The difference is that every minute of it is interesting.

If The Creator were any more slanted, any more in the tank for the coming AI onslaught, you would think it was produced, written and directed by AI.

In his feature director debut, Grant Singer (previously a music video director who’s worked with artists from Sam Smith to Skrillex) adopts a measured pace that lends the movie a somber, mysterious aura. But he breaks that up with smart, psychologically insightful cutting.

It took the franchise four tries, but with Expend4bles, they’ve finally made a solid and consistently effective action movie.

Dumb Money is a tale of 2020, and the movie captures that 2020 feeling — gray, depressed, anxious and almost comically miserable.

Neeson’s last few action flicks may have been just for fans, but Retribution is for everybody.