Mick LaSalle

In its modestly comic way, the movie delves into the question of when it’s better to lie than tell the truth.

The pace of Master Gardener is measured, but there’s nothing relaxing about it.

If you love the “Fast & Furious” franchise, you will like Fast X. If you merely like the series, the new movie will leave you indifferent. And if you’ve never seen a “Fast & Furious” movie, Fast X is not the place to start. It’s a middling installment, a big step down from the stupid-wonderful “F9: The Fast Saga,” but with just enough of the crazy stunts and chases that you can’t find anywhere else.

Lacking the velocity and excitement of an action movie and the reality of good drama, The Mother is the worst of both worlds.

BlackBerry was ultimately left behind — in the cemetery plot next to Myspace. Still, if you ever had a BlackBerry, there’s something not only entertaining but nostalgic in watching this movie.

Book Club was, at best, a pleasant diversion. But Book Club: The Next Chapter is something more. It’s a movie that proves that it’s possible to make an entertaining, full-length picture with practically no story.

In her feature debut, Manzoor does something truly bizarre here, and not in a good way. She gets a whole audience rooting for love to triumph but then tries to make a lovable heroine out of the irrational, malevolent character who wants to undermine everything the audience is looking forward to.

You’ll see lots of movies in 2023, and you’ll forget most of them. But Carmen is so sincerely passionate and peculiar that you’re bound to remember it.

Ghosted is repellent without ever quite being obnoxious and worthless without ever being boring.

A structure might have inhibited Aster’s impulse for meaningless excess. Instead, we get a movie that’s all talent and no discipline, which, in practice, is even worse than a movie that’s all discipline and no talent. At least the latter tries to please the audience; the former just pleases the filmmaker.

What Ritchie is able to convey is the terrifying nature of this kind of small-scale combat, with the enemy coming out from nowhere and from every direction. Even if you’ve never experienced anything like this, there’s something about what Ritchie does here that feels authentic.

Mafia Mamma is a one-joke movie, but it finds ways to keep that one joke funny for 100 minutes.

The movie is about a sculptor, played by Michelle Williams, in the days leading up to a gallery show. That’s all it’s about, and yet it’s enough. The pleasure of Showing Up is in being dropped into this woman’s life and, more profoundly, into her consciousness.

The film follows its own winding path and covers a lot of emotional ground in 96 minutes, with Michaela Watkins lovely in a key role as Carl’s former lover and colleague. Some movies are more than just a story, they’re a world — and Paint is a world worth visiting.

Air might not quite be in the class of “Gone Baby Gone” or “The Town,” but it’s old-fashioned in the best sense: solid, confident, simple, straightforward and entirely entertaining. It’s the work of an intelligent classicist.

As a movie, Spinning Gold is a clumsy effort with a lot wrong with it, except for the real-life story, which never stops being interesting.

Tetris holds an audience’s attention until the finish, without ever quite commanding it. To some degree, Noah Pink’s screenplay deserves credit for taking an arcane business story and rendering it entertaining. But the story gets so extreme and unlikely in the movie’s last half hour that it becomes easy to separate fact from fiction.

There’s no question that John Wick: Chapter 4 is really good for what it is. The only bad thing is what it is.

A work of art such as A Good Person cannot be the product of some casual connection. It’s the product of a soul connection, and I hope Braff and Pugh get another chance to work together.

The real story of the King Richard dig is fascinating, but the movie, directed by Stephen Frears (“Cheri,” “The Queen”), is just OK.

Moving On is effortlessly intelligent in depicting the experience of being old. Even if you’re not there yet, you know intuitively that old age has very little to do with sitting in a rocking chair in perfect equanimity. It’s about living with the accumulation of things you did and things you didn’t do.

The formula is tired, and it’s particularly sad to see Shazam! surrender so completely and pathetically to it, when it might have been DC Comics most human superhero franchise.

Watching Inside is like being stuck inside a house, unable to escape. No, it’s worse than that. It’s like being stuck inside a house, unable to escape, and Willem Dafoe is there with you.

Harrelson and Olson make a good pair. He’s genial and bewildered and expects the best, while she’s guarded and clear-eyed and expects the worst. They deserve a better movie, but they make Champions more than bearable.

Unfortunately, “Operation Fortune” doesn’t consist entirely of scenes between Grant and Plaza. There are pockets of genuine life onscreen, followed by long, dull stretches. The movie always gets better, but then it always gets worse. Then gets better again. It’s that kind of experience.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that conveyed with such vividness and precision the helplessness of childhood.

Maren’s direction is tonally right, full of warmth and touches of humor; he makes it an inviting film to watch.

To put it into a larger perspective, if Creed III were a “Rocky” movie, it would be up there — nowhere near the original “Rocky” and a little worse than “Rocky II,” but certainly better than the rest of them.