Ask Mick LaSalle: If only they’d done one more movie

Are there any movie directors no longer making films that, as you think about their body of work, you wish could have made one more movie?

On the plus side, he did make a lot of movies, so it’s not like the case of, say, Jean Vigo, who made one feature-length film (“L’Atalante”) and then died.

Truffaut had reached a point where he was almost incapable of making a bad movie, because even his routine films were infused with a certain romantic, life-affirming spirit.

[...] he got sick, in 1983, he had a handful of tantalizing projects in various stages of conception — you look at the list and feel the loss.

There have been several films made with multiple directors that were done in segments, my favorites being “Paris, Je t’Aime” and “The Turning,” an Australian film.

[...] there cannot be a system for reviewing movies, because art doesn’t yield to systems.

Teachers who say they take off two points for spelling and three points for run-on sentences are kidding themselves, because calculations don’t apply in this case, and the intuitive impression is the truest and most accurate.

Hey Chuck: I think if we’re talking about great sports movies, we should probably eliminate anything whose story revolves around winning the big game, or at least those whose whole point is bound up in that winning or losing.

With that in mind, “Rocky,” “Field of Dreams,” “Any Given Sunday,” “The Natural,” “Pride of the Yankees” and “Big Fan” (starring Patton Oswalt) all are worthy candidates for distinction.

(That’s John Sayles’ movie about the Black Sox scandal.) It’s a really sad story that goes into various aspects of American life, and about how these players became the fall guys and didn’t really deserve what happened to them.

[...] maybe it’s not a sports movie, but a movie about an athlete who gets really fat and becomes a bad stand-up comic.