Mick LaSalle

CODA is lovely. If you want to see a movie that will make you feel good, this is it.

Apart from a few lapses, Filomarino is straightforward and gets the job done. Along the way, he taps into everyone’s most paranoid fantasy about foreign travel — where the police and authority figures turn on you, and the Constitution or Bill of Rights are a few thousand miles away.

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

Respect has everything you could hope for in a musical biopic. It has a good story and great songs and, best of all, it has someone in the lead role who can put those songs over.

Long before the end, audiences will stop worrying about the characters and start worrying about themselves — about when they’ll get to leave.

In The Suicide Squad, writer-director James Gunn has done the seemingly impossible: He has found the fun in the Suicide Squad. He has come up with a way to take what seemed like a dead concept and turn it into an action-packed joke machine.

The film is kindly and well-intended, but it’s also sentimental and lifeless. Swan Song is a rare movie without a single good scene.

Though there are political elements here, to be sure, Pray Away has more the feeling of witnessing multiple spiritual journeys. These journeys are, by their very nature, moving.

The Green Knight is a strange film — so out of step with current trends, so original in its conception, so willing to take its time and follow its own course — that it must be counted among the better films of 2021.

To their credit, by the time the movie ends, Blunt and Johnson have made the sale. I believed them and liked seeing them together. They don’t make Jungle Cruise worth seeing or even worth tolerating. But for scattered minutes across this wasteland, they make it less painful.

Snake Eyes collapses in a crosscurrent of conflicting character motives, joyless plot twists and who-cares violence.

Old is, at times, clumsy and obvious, but it’s different and weird, and it taps into something essential. It might be a distant second to The Sixth Sense, but it’s the second-best movie Shyamalan has made.

Audiences will come away feeling like they’ve really been somewhere, that they were moved by the people they met and expanded by the experience. You can’t ask more from a movie.

It’s a flat, forlorn movie with occasional sparks of life.

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

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

It would probably be a mistake to emphasize the relationship aspect of The Tomorrow War too much. At its core, this is just a really good monster movie. All the same, there’s a touch of beauty to it.

In all ways, it’s unexpected — in its subject, in its treatment of its subject, and in its whole look and feel. It’s an original and interesting movie.

A movie can’t just be crazy, lest it go off a cliff and never land. It also needs a human core, and Diesel and Rodriguez are it.

If anything, this modest but entirely charming movie may deserve a tiny slice of immortality by showing the kind of goofy, escapist fun that can be created even in a grim time.

To its credit, no matter how self-important and dreary Infinite gets at times, it’s never dull, and there’s always a little sparkle to it and a reason to keep watching.

Awake fails only in the sense that it’s a movie in one note, and thus its story only knows one direction, which is downhill.

The obvious thing to expect here is that writer-director Christian Petzold is using the Undine”myth as a metaphor. But no, he’s doing the actual myth.

In this new Conjuring, every scene of demonic possession, every demonic hallucination, and every underworld visit and visitation land with unsettling impact. These are, in a sense, action scenes, and they’re creepy, chilling and very well done.

The idea of a worldwide calamity returning with a vengeance is an awful prospect that audiences, at this moment in particular, might find dreadful. So, it’s especially easy to sympathize with the characters in these early moments. Yet after the opening, A Quiet Place II doesn’t show us anything new, and soon the movie’s energy flags.

Everything that’s good about Cruella can’t obscure the fact that it was a very bad idea. The movie makes gestures toward style. It has first-rate costume design. The soundtrack contains a series of well-loved but mostly irrelevant pop songs from the 1960s and ’70s. But we still end up with a movie that should never have been made.

Art is either alive or dead, and this movie is emphatically and exuberantly living, energized by what can only truly be described as love. The movie’s love is for the place, for the characters and for all their dreams. In movies, as in life, love is rare. It makes everything better, and it must be respected.

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.