Mick LaSalle

David Lowery has made a movie that is as outside the pattern of our current popular filmmaking as can be possibly imagined. That takes more than vision alone. It takes courage.

Most of Widows isn’t felt. It’s a cold exercise, and occasionally a ridiculous one, as when McQueen tries to get fancy, with camera angles that make no sense.

In King Arthur, everything goes wrong. The film combines the plodding sincerity of a Ph.D. dissertation with the brains of a high-concept Jerry Bruckheimer- produced blockbuster (which it is), and no one benefits.

Boys State is the most depressing film about boys since “Lord of the Flies.” If anything, it’s even more bleak, because it’s not fiction and it’s not allegory. No, this is a documentary about actual boys.

Most of life is melodramatic — emotional, involving and lacking the dignity of straight drama. 3 Hearts is life as felt from the inside.

Homicide is a haunting picture that nags at you, days later. It provides no neat answers to the questions it raises about the merits of assimilation vs. maintaining one's ethnic, racial or religious identity, but rather captures something of the times. It might not be the most satisfying movie out there, yet there's a sense about it that, years from now, Homicide will seem even better than it does today.[18 Oct 1991, p.D1]

It's an exuberant, well- crafted film that gets the audience involved on a gut level even before the opening credits are over.

The movie itself is a worthy thing, too, but it's not as good as Clooney is here, which is to say, it's not great.

It's a film that, in its own peculiar way, forces viewers to question their values and ask themselves how much they're willing to sacrifice for a functioning society, and how much is too much.

As innocent as a Disney movie -- and a lot more entertaining.

A smart and literate effort with a few weaknesses.

The movie lacks joy. It has poignancy and intelligence, and it holds interest, but it never opens up into happiness and fantasy. Maybe it's the recession.

It’s a school shooting movie for this particular moment and plays like a dispatch from the front lines. It’s past trying to figure out what these tragedies mean. It just wants to explore how a person might assimilate such a trauma and go forward in life.

The energy of the play's best scenes is dissipated in the film version, but they still work. [02 Oct 1992, p.C1]

This is human drama at its most intense and universal. This is the rare film that can change the way you think and see the world.

Perhaps the idea of watching Jeff Bridges as a drunken, broken-down, down-on-his luck country music singer in Crazy Heart doesn't automatically sound appealing. But think this: "The Wrestler." With good songs.

The result is a movie that combines a seriousness of purpose with an impish delight in craft, in a way Hitchcock would have appreciated.

The result is embarrassing: quick cuts and shaky, hand- held camera work, bad acting and lots of attitude.

The tone is low-key, and Franco never presses the audience. Instead, he lets scenes happen, avoiding close-ups and all other means of exaggeration or emphasis.

It’s a pretty good movie that automatically goes up one full notch because of a single great scene, which is one more than most movies have.

It's hard to tell if Cage's performance is a grand stab at all-out, no-holds-barred comic acting or one of the worst dramatic performances in a film this year. [2 June 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E8]

Snags on the fact that neither story depicted -- not Kaufman's and especially not Orlean's -- is enough to sustain more than an incidental interest.

A funny movie, but also a serious movie, and — who knows? — maybe an important one.

Darkly comic tone of heroin-addiction film sets it apart

The movie drags.