Mick LaSalle

Qualifies as director Giuseppe Tornatore's second full-fledged masterpiece. His first: "Cinema Paradiso."

The Two Popes is movie nirvana, but anyone watching could appreciate the clash between these opposing dispositions and world views.

It’s a movie about a geeky teenager living in the Los Angeles hood, and something about it, or rather everything about it, feels real.

There is no turning away from the screen.

Original, truthful and moving.

Rocky might not be the brightest guy, but he knows things. He has his limitations, but he is, in his own way, extraordinary, and when we look at his/Stallone’s face, we can have no doubt that Rocky has gone through life and learned things. He has been awake all these years, and growing. With no exaggeration, this is a beautiful and moving thing to see.

They are naturals at acting, not because they're good at lying but because they can't be phony.

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.

The movie is a total blast, and what a surprise.

Powerful and outrageous.

Economically and stunningly, Almodovar combines a high sense of style with a deep sense of humanity, along with a touch of erotic beauty that has always characterized his work.

The Past makes conventional movies feel artificial. Watching the characters interact in this movie feels like "Here is real life," and real life just happens to be strangely compelling.

Though specific to the stories of its central characters, this documentary is as complicated as life. It’s happy, sad and uncertain — genuinely moving and uplifting, yet never reassuring.

The experience of Southpaw is rather like seeing the truth behind the cliches, revived in all their pain and power to surprise.

An ideal introduction to Toback's output as well as a welcome elucidation for longtime fans. Apart from those worthy functions, The Outsider is also shrewdly made, illuminating its subject in a variety of settings and, at times, subtly assuming the style of Toback's films.

Extraordinary and beautiful.

A Hologram for the King has great energy, and also a languorous, lived-in quality.

With Diane, as in life, it feels like nothing’s going on, but everything’s going on.

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.

A gentle movie. It’s valedictory, with a sense of the ephemeral nature of life, the inevitability of regret, and the bittersweetness of looking back on past happiness.

Not a heist film, a thriller, a twisted romance, a film noir or a character study, but a unique concoction that bends all these genres to its vision.

It is an exhilaration from beginning to end. It's the movie equivalent of that rare sort of novel where you find yourself checking to see how many pages are left and hoping there are more, not fewer.

Two hours of nonstop, nail-biting tension and anxiety.

At its best, Fury examines the psychological experience of warfare.

Cagney, the film's best asset, is irrepressible. [07 May 2006, p.34]

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.

An intriguing document, and the first significant film ever made about a former U.S. president.

Unique and courageous. It may be counted as one of the year's few steps forward in cinema.