Amy Nicholson

As an action film — which in small bursts it is — Blue Ruin is disquieting and raw, like Commando turned inside out.

It's a smart film about the shrinking divide between man and robot. It's also a hoot, an anti-comedy where all of the jokes double as threats, and vice versa.

It's a staggering film, but not a brilliant one — a superior version would have played more with the gulf between our senses and theirs.

Lee is credited as a director for filming a live performance of Rodney King on an outdoor stage in New York. But Lee mostly seems to have loaned Smith his brand name to get the monologue attention. He doesn't leave a fingerprint on the play, and didn't care about where to put the cameras. The angles make no sense; the edits are clumsy.

This deservedly anticipated Frankenstein transforms that loneliness into stunning tableaux of Victor and his immortal Creature tethered together by their mutual self-loathing. One man’s heart never turned on. One can’t get his heart to turn off. Ours breaks.

What lingers is Kedi’s awareness that the city is alive.

If it weren’t for Moore and Qualley hurling themselves into the shared role, it’d be as flat as a scotch-taped pin-up. If it weren’t for Moore, I’m not even sure it would work.

This is a rebellious, empathetic adventure story about a grandmother who catches on that her society needs to learn how to think freely.

If Woodard is hoping for her overdue second Oscar nomination after 1983’s “Cross Creek,” she’s got a decent shot with this excruciating character arc. Yet, the actress is even better in the scenes where Bernadine simply gets drunk, even if she still can’t talk about anything but work.

This sparse marvel leaves the audience rattled by how small decisions lead to big consequences. Still, you're most likely to leave the theater gushing about the cast's bravura unbroken performances.

Adams doesn’t gain much by returning for Disenchanted, a cluttered and noisy sequel directed by Adam Shankman from a screenplay by Brigitte Hales. Neither does the original film’s fan base.

For all its clichés, this furious and discomfiting film tugs on your conscience for days, making a powerful case to turn the American public’s attention back to a conflict it would rather forget.

Green is a storyteller with such control that we don’t leave the theater feeling patronized or hectored. She’s thought everything out, and planned it so that every scene in The Royal Hotel is as gripping as it is pointed.

Hedlund’s humble, hard-to-love performance makes the aptly named Burden work as both a portrait of one weak-minded man, and as a study of the ideas people carry without questioning why.

Even as the movie captures Williams’ recklessness, it’s also a convincing sketch of his artistic growth and commitment.

Arnow’s sophisticated point — the one referenced in the film’s unwieldy title — is what drives interest until our own spirits snap.

Presence is being sold as a ghost story, but it’s more like a family drama disguised under a sheet. The eye holes are the only thing separating it from a thousand other ordinary little films about the injuries people do to those they love. Otherwise, the story doesn’t have enough flesh on its bones to hold our interest.

Madec and Ben's showdown becomes a battle to see which type of man is best equipped for survival: the well-funded scoundrel or the honest grunt. The film is too honest itself to always give us the answer we want. It's also too dully on-the-nose to entertain.

Project Hail Mary is wholesome science fiction that satisfies like a jumbo serving of apple pie and milk.

Chi-Raq is a marvel. It's Lee resurrecting his voice — angry, impassioned, and funny as hell — right when we need to hear it.

Though the pair whisper the word “love” in bed and even seem to think they mean it, this is not a movie about two people healing each other. It’s about two broken souls mashing their jagged edges together, hurting each other and those around them. And it’s fun to watch the blood splatter.

Gleeson is one of the finest actors we have, and in casting him as the lead, McDonagh stacks the deck so that regardless of our own religious reservations, we're forced to care about Father James as a man.

As a debut film, Arizona shows that Watson could become a director with interesting ideas, but this housing crisis horror comedy is definitely just a rental.

At a time when judgment and self-righteousness outrank forgiveness and empathy, Nadine is the heroine we need.

Logan is the rare action flick in which the quiet moments are as compelling as any of the fights.

Tonally, it’s an ungainly creature. From scene to scene, it lurches like the brain doesn’t know what the body is doing. Garland and Boyle don’t want the audience to know either, at least not yet.

This is Carney’s saltiest ode to creative expression — and, peculiarly, his most relatable.

It’s a terrific showcase for the duo and their entire cast, which, besides a pop-up bit from Clement, is curated from a local talent pool that Hollywood has yet to spelunk. After this, it should.

Sticking within the bounds of reality does make for a heck of a good slow-speed car chase. Those craving flashier, bullet-spraying butt-kickery will have to hope for a more gonzo sequel.

Cartel Land is interested in how idealism becomes corrupt.

It’s a simple, gentle tale that’s told beautifully but feels hollow — like a eulogy for an acquaintance.

The Satanic Temple’s combination of shock tactics and anti-discrimination lawsuits is check-and-mate against America creeping towards a Christian theocracy.

The doc gives Mercado’s story back to Mercado. Better, it shows that Mercado is still the same spiritualistic, highfalutin’ fashion-plate as a retiree eating breakfast at home as he was on TV. The film’s biggest revelation is that Mercado’s mystical, magnificent, big-hearted shtick was no fraud — he was always the real deal.

A transcendent comic chiller, when The Guest's characters are in peril we actually care, and Wingard respectfully makes the kills clean and quick.

At times, Wonder Woman feels like watching Splash with a shield — another babelicious naïf breaking all the rules. Yet the joke isn't on her. It's on all the men mistaking unsophistication for weakness. To be uncultured is to be mentally free; no one's put on a yoke. That's what makes Wonder Woman a knockout.

The movie doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere until it explodes, and the dazzling fireworks don’t quite offset its long, seemingly aimless fuse.

Helander and editor Juho Virolainen pace the carnage like slapstick. They have a nimble rhythm for how many times a victim can dodge disaster before splattering. The violence is so big that it becomes comedy, even getting us laughing at a severed head, twice.

Fehlbaum milks a good amount of tension out of men in headsets barking orders at their desks, although the conceit is harder to pull off once the action moves farther away and news comes in slower and slower.

Obvious Child is perfect for those who want more honesty in fiction.

Now that Linklater has ascended to the establishment, he’s encouraging cinema’s future by turning to its inspirational past with Nouvelle Vague, the lively story of how Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) directed Breathless with a tiny bit of cash and a ton of ego. It’s the origin story of Godard, and, in a way, of himself. Even more importantly, it’s a manual for what Linklater hopes will be a fresh wave of talent storming the shore any minute. (I’m counting on it.)

Hokum is a fabulous horror film for all tastes.

Like Brooke's dream business, a café/convenience store/hair salon, Mistress America is a mishmash of ideas — fortunately, Kirke gives a fantastic performance that quietly grounds the film.

Despite the fact that the camera rarely backs away from studying Plaza’s wary eyes and tense mouth in close-up, this character piece feels as distanced from its taciturn subject as if it was merely monitoring her on security camera.

The masterstroke of Frank, the film ex-Sidebottom collaborator Jon Ronson has now co-written, is that this time the man in the mask is a modern Mozart. And, unsparingly, Ronson has written himself as the jealous goober who risks everything, with the delusion that he's the smart one.

It's impossible to watch The Punk Singer and not ask if feminism is dead. That's a fair starting question. But a better one is what if it isn't — what if we've just stopped recognizing it?

Brooks can merely offer this flawed pair more kindness than they grant each other (or themselves). Which makes “Oh, Hi!” a pleasant if perilous date night film. Having spent an enjoyable evening with it myself, I have to admit: I like the movie fine, but I’m not in love.

Lacking Iron Man’s wit, the Hulk’s brains, and the Captain’s ideals, he’s in peril of going poof himself if the franchise doesn’t figure out how to capitalize on its most glorious hero.

The French provocateur Catherine Breillat gets her kicks with unnerving tales of sexual coercion, but a clothed, close-up first kiss in “Last Summer” may be her most excruciating to date.

Jinn is the rare coming-of-age story that doesn’t simply pat kids on the head and tell them they just need to love themselves. Instead, Mu’min holds her characters accountable for the way they discombobulate each other’s lives, while giving them the space to do better, if they can figure out what better is.

Attention has been paid; it’s just not equally distributed. The tone is uneasy teetering on anarchic, veering from giddily moronic one-liners to — more shockingly — a climax with deep empathy and visual awe.

Hazanavicius has made a movie that tests our ideas of creative genius.

It’s one part doom cloud, one part squirting prank flower — an uneasy balance that’s united only by stunning visuals which sweep the audience along even when the gags stumble.

It's a comedy of exasperation where, for once, the joke isn't on McCarthy, but on everyone who can't see her skills.

In the first film, his rhythmic overkills felt brutal. Here, they're more like a dance, and the best bits of the movie have a lightness that made me giggle with delight.

The film punctures that airless sense of fate which can suffocate period pieces and restores this moment of upheaval to immediacy.

This is a lean, cruel film about the ethics of photographing violence, a predicament any one of us could be in if we have a smartphone in our hand during a crisis.

The Wolfpack is more like a diorama of the Angulos' unusual childhood than an explanatory documentary.

Like most coming-of-age flicks, Morris From America tries too hard to make friends. At least its scenes of unearned triumph are balanced by embarrassing bits that hit emotional bullseyes. It’s so likable I wondered if I was a sap for enjoying it, so I watched it again and liked it more.

Nothing about Together screams comedy, yet that’s precisely how it’s put together. Awkward humor is the skeleton under its prestige nightmare surface, even as it’s wonderfully, heartbreakingly tragic to watch our leads roil to melt together like mozzarella.

This is a film that delights in unspoken terrors and audience misdirection.

Future Past starts fast and never slows down. There's not a line of dialogue that isn't exposition... What fun there is slips in through director Bryan Singer's visuals.

It’s a delight that borrows from everything — westerns, musicals, heist capers, horror, Jane Austen and James Bond — to build its writer and director, Nida Manzoor, into a promising new thing: a first-time filmmaker impatient to evolve cultural representation from the last few years of self-conscious vitamins into crowd-pleasing candy.

Nothing in here makes an argument to be on the big screen. But it’s darned delightful, like a fizzy soda on a hot day.

The script is lean enough that there really isn’t room for narrative flubs besides one breakdown that’s a bit too convenient. Hawkins lets herself get vulnerable, too, and the film never fakes a punch by pretending she’s anything more than a small, desperate and bedraggled woman with eyes that look like a bottomless well of need.

With The LEGO Batman Movie, a shiny, irresistible delight, blockbuster flicks have perfected their ideal form.

The older Cruise gets, the more he relies on his fists. (And his abs, and his nerves — he'll never let you forget he does his own stunts, and why should he?) His body is the wonder-gizmo, and Christopher McQuarrie, writer and director of the fifth entry, Rogue Nation, keeps the camera on him like a nature show about a hungry lion.

Writer-director Baig has made a coming-of-age charmer that’s adamantly ordinary. Her script has the melody of John Hughes and early Amy Heckerling played with a few minor chords.

This is a movie about letting the mind roam.

The film is heavy on the dread, light on the narrative. It’s all about the tension in the gym where the adults are just as melodramatic as the girls.

“I’m going to fake it till I make it!” vows Austyn. At first, “Jawline” also feels committed to his rise. Mandelup changes her intention so gradually that the third act of the film feels a little aimless. Still, she’s smart to momentarily give the mic to the female fans to explain their devotion, though the uniformity of their answers is depressing.

The pull of the film lies in how Davidtz allows Bobo to bob on the surface of things while we feel the dark undertow

Dunham prevails in convincing audiences that coming-of-age in a so-called simpler time was equally tumultuous, and crams the corners of her movie with images of other female characters discreetly seizing their own moments of satisfaction — glimpses of joys which realize that it’s in the margins of a medieval tale where the best stuff happens.

Two things continue to hoist “Jackass” above its legion of imitators, many of whom are now found on TikTok. First, the razor-sharp slow-motion cinematography, which immortalizes writhing men in wet underpants with the devotion of Michelangelo sculpting “The Pietà.” Second — and more important — is the crew’s friendship.

Casting JonBenét, my favorite film at this year's Sundance, shows a director in full control.

It’s candied history. The timeline is all wrong, the soundtrack is too cheery, the movie is too eager to please. Yet at the end, I found myself tearing up anyway.

The perceptive dramedy I Used to Be Funny features a mic-drop performance by Rachel Sennott as a rising stand-up comedian derailed by a vague, internet-viral crime.

Tom Hanks is so quietly compelling that he gives the film an illusion of depth.

Yes, Nine Lives is dumb. Yes, it’s for very young kids. Yes, Lil Bub has a cameo. And yes, I giggled anyway.

Thorne has made a resolute portrait of a woman who can’t break free of generational trauma.

It is a pity that Richard Bean and Clive Coleman’s script mires Bunton in a soggy family drama about an unresolved death; an elder son (Jack Bandeira) who flirts with crime; and a wife, Dorothy (Helen Mirren, so sheepish as to be near invisible), who is humiliated that her husband prefers prison to a stable home.

If the film has a flaw, its that it’s so preoccupied with balancing its furious feminism with gags about Victorian life that there’s little running time to lavish on Dickinson’s actual poetry.

Big Hero 6 is easier to admire than to love. It veers from chipper to noisy to dark stretches where it grapples with adult-sized grief.

Miranda’s devotion to his idol keeps him from expanding the musical’s myopic fretting into a universal story of sacrifice and resolve. Garfield at least gives Larson an endearing vulnerability.

Joe is Cage's periodic reminder that he's one of his generation's great talents.

Música, Mancuso’s phenomenal feature debut, is a comic trip inside a mind that’s forever feverishly creating — even against his will.

America is so punch-drunk that The Fight often feels like it’s whacking old bruises. But that is the national psyche’s problem more than the filmmakers’. For their part, they have made a worthwhile record of the civil rights advocates combating the country’s backslide into stripping away rights for voters, immigrants, pregnant women and the LGBTQ community.

From the Head settles into an enjoyably miserablist episodic rhythm.

Design-wise, the “Inside Out” characters are Pixar’s crudest work, with the blocky colors and stiff hair of a creature in a TV commercial for insecticide. Blown up to the big screen, they just look worse. Narratively, however, the film’s portrait of Joy is beautifully complex.

Actually witnessing the audience’s emotional connection to her lyrics makes “Hit Me Hard and Soft” feel like an epic coming-of-age movie as much as a concert film. Still, by the 50th mascara-smeared face, I needed fresh air.

Once the major ideas are on the table, the momentum wobbles and The Platform trades thrills for the empathetic weight of imprisonment. There’s more blood and less hope, though Aranzazu Calleja’s music box-inspired score can lighten the mood to that of a storybook fable.

The humble Kyle onscreen is Kyle with his flaws written out. We're not watching a biopic. We're watching a drama about an idealized soldier, a patriot beyond reproach, which bolsters Kyle's legend while gutting the man.

I liked the plot better on a second watch when I knew not to expect Jamie Lee Curtis on all fours. The ending is great and the build up to it, though draggy, gives you space to think about the interdependence between our species.

Sierra Burgess is a Loser is a slumber-party charmer that wants to satisfy every craving, even when what audiences are hungry for clashes, like pouring a chocolate milkshake over a pepperoni pizza.

Lamont trusts his movie is personality-powered. He’s calibrated each performance to fit together like a 12-piece band, and he knows that some jokes are even funnier when whispered. But I’m in the mood to speak up: I’ve missed this type of satisfying junk food. Waiter, bring me another.

Defa’s tight and tidy focus on communication — mostly verbal, sometimes role play (“Hug me like you haven’t seen me for three years,” Rachel instructs Eric) — adds a smart layer to this otherwise familiar tale of estrangement.

Escobar is after something deeper than parody. She wants audiences to question how fictional strongmen have been idealized as real-world saviors.

Will-o’-the-Wisp, an off-balance provocation from the Portuguese titillater João Pedro Rodrigues, is a prank in fancy dress, a plastic boutonniere that squirts battery acid. The joke is on everyone, particularly the powerful and those holding out hope that the powerful will save the planet.

Bros is hyper-conscious that it’s a landmark built on a fault line. No matter how many ideas it crams into its quick-paced plot, it’s doomed to fall short of representing an entire group of people — and it knows it shouldn’t have to. As such, Eichner’s challenge makes for a conflicted Cupid.