Amy Nicholson

Roach has insightfully made this about people, not societal scapegoats. He and McNamara have changed up nearly everything in this disaster except its vibrations of dread.

It’s the kind of intimate tour of New York that usually gets called a love letter to the city, except the corners Aronofsky likes have so much grime and menace and humor that it’s more like an affectionate dirty limerick.

Earlier incarnations of this story had activism as the end goal, Valentin for his principles and Molina for his new friend. Condon is more focused on their humanity. Caring for each other makes this bleak world worth fighting for. Without joy, we’re already in chains.

With the whole super-racket on the ropes, the cast of “Deadpool & Wolverine” seizes the opportunity to prove the power of their own charisma.

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.

As Paltrow (Gwyneth’s brother), who directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Tom Shoval, makes his own case that history is built of small, individual actions that tend to be overlooked, he allows himself a bit of gallows humor.

This solid genre pic salutes its touchstones.

The film adores Cena’s sentimental brute who has hams for calves and kitten GIFs for brains.

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.

Split has to satisfy both audiences that believe in trigger warnings and the camp crowd that just wants to see McAvoy pull the trigger. And so, Shyamalan trickily asks us to redefine victimhood.

The camera is more athletic than anyone on-screen, muscling between bullets and smashing through walls. Heyvaert shoots action so well that you forgive how little physical action there actually is.

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.

This is the type of fantasy that admits its characters get sunburned and dirty and need to, er, use the bathroom. It takes a female director to allow her female star to be this un-vain. Amirpour would rather be bold than beautiful.

The film stirs the soul less by the magic of ghosts than by the power of human connection.

Dillard's not interested in the Zing! Pow! Bam! Sleight is quiet, almost naturalistic, even when Bo is stopping bullets with his bare hand. To Dillard, none of this is cool.

Once Encounter reveals its destination, there aren’t many places for the script to go, though there’s a savage little side trip to a rural militia during which it becomes clearer that this Ahmed acting showcase is also interested in touring the American psyche

The big CG sequences are less captivating than simply watching the four ladies kick it with a pizza. Wiig and McCarthy nestle into their comfortable roles as the soft-spoken priss and the bustling madwoman, leaving room for Jones to barge in with her big punch lines. But keep your eyes on the background. That’s where Jones’s Saturday Night Live costar McKinnon lurks, quietly transforming herself into a movie star.

Where Dory was saccharine, Pets is anarchic. It’s the difference between Mickey Mouse and Looney Tunes or The Muppets, where crazy creatures take aim at each other with cannons. That sense of play infects the animation, which favors fun over photo-realism.

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.

It’s not hard to imagine “Transformers One” connecting with preteens whose pubescent bodies can be as unwieldy as Orion’s first, clumsy transformation, with wheels where he expects legs and arms where he expects wheels.

[Davis's] insistence on shaking hands and showing respect — the opposite of the behavior you see on Twitter — patiently chips away at their preconceptions about race. It's like he's trying to carve the Lincoln Memorial with a scalpel.

Red One is a sour sugarplum of a Christmas treat, a cheerfully cynical action comedy for kids — especially the ones who asked Santa Claus for ninja stars and a Nerf gun.

Scott still has a talent for lovely details... He's always used awe as a tool. Scott's art direction is so precise we assume he also obsessed over the script. Surely a spectacle like this has gotta mean something. Like the intelligent-design argument, his eye is too advanced to be an accident.

The best part of Ridley’s performance is her plodding, heavy-footed walk that reminds us this well-groomed lady is still a stubborn child underneath her fancy dress. She has a blank, open face that absorbs the court’s machinations and reflects little back until she decides to act insane.

This reboot’s boldest stride toward progress is that it values emotionally credible performances.

Jones delivers her line readings so robotically that even her truths sound like lies. She's got the look of a Hitchcock blonde, and the movements of a deer in the headlights. Even her kisses look fake.

Toni Collette rages through Catherine Hardwicke's cancer weepie Miss You Already like a fire in a chain restaurant. The film around her is good, welcoming fare, the kind that snobs always underestimate.

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.

He's selling nonsense fantasy in a movie that's nonsense fantasy, but boy is Tatum the real deal.

We’re so pleasantly pummeled by silliness that the film comes to feel like a massage.

In a sense, Triet has mapped a path to nowhere. You can respect her choice intellectually and still walk away grumbling in frustration.

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths invites you to spend an hour and a half with the most insufferable woman in the world. (If you personally know a worse one, my condolences.) That the unpleasantness turns out to be time well spent is a credit to Leigh’s curiosity about miserable jerks and the joy-sucking traps they set for themselves and others.

There's plenty of atmosphere and awe, even if it's in the service of a story that starts rote and finds its sea legs only when half the divers have sunk their bones to Davy Jones.

Clemons has been a luminous presence who could bloom into a great grown-up actress. Hearts Beat Loud proves she’s the real deal. As for the film around her, Haley’s 21-drum solo salute to the passage of time is, like Frank, merely fine. But he admirably keeps his characters’ victories small and their losses familiar, making his movie a ballad everyone can hum to.

At times, the doc feels like science-fiction without the fiction. Swap whales for aliens and these two doctors aglow with the thrill of discovery could double for Jodie Foster in “Contact” or Amy Adams in “Arrival.”

“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.

Kimberly Peirce changes almost nothing in her rallying remake of Brian De Palma’s classic about a troubled telekinetic teenager. She doesn’t have to.

Eclipse has its cheesecake and eats it, too.

The film is expertly crafted with jewel-toned cinematography, terrifically sleazy saxophone music, and performances by Abbott and Wasikowska that take turns seizing command. Still, like Reed’s solo rehearsals, Piercing has the feel of a blueprint, a talented man exercising his technical skills while waiting for a whack at the real deal.

Outrage works in the movie’s favor; this polite weepie needs the added spice. While about an unconventional affair, the movie is more interested in suppression and restraint.

Young Ones is an old-fashioned, worthwhile curio down to the closing credits.

While it's easy to tease first-time writer-director Tom Gormican's raunchy rom-com, the trio has a shaggy chemistry, and most of the jokes hit.

Chris Matheson's script focuses its energy on small, wickedly funny gags, half of which Robinson seems to have sputtered out as improv.

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.

“For Good” is a worthwhile return to Oz. The extra scenes and rejiggered duets justify the running time (even if the 160-minute length of the first film remains unforgivable).

While every image is as bright and colorful as a new box of crayons, the kids themselves never come across as artificial, thanks in part to Jamal Sims’ naturalistic but crisp choreography, which emphasizes stomps and leans and long-legged strides.

A Perfect Day is a wry salute to the hard-drinking, eye-rolling aid workers of the world, men and women whose high ideals get crushed by global bureaucracy and local recalcitrance.

Although Plaza’s character makes it clear this is a story about complicity and manipulation, Baena keeps the tone silly, barely striving for scares even when creepy masks slink into view. He’s content to let the music take over — and so are we with its sly needle-drops that pull from heady italo disco and giallo horror scores.

This wisecracking, tear-jerking, deep-fried decadence is plenty satisfying if you’re in the mood to indulge.

This frenetic and funny crossbreeding of live action and cartoon is both a reboot and an anti-reboot, a corporate-funded raspberry at corporate IP, and a giddily dumb smart aleck committed to mocking its joke — and making it, too.

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

An odd little film that aims only to please itself.

Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie is as fair a portrayal the weak-chinned warrior will get — and fairer than he deserves.

Once the bash really gets going, I was swept up in the chaos and happily clicked off my brain. Screenwriter Paula Pell classes up the dumb stuff with a touch of depth.

Instead of slapstick laughs, The Long Dumb Road pays attention to how these two opposites connect.

In its small moments, say when Walhberg sighs that his robe misspells "Micky," The Fighter feels clued-in to the very small, very tough world of a man trying to make his way out of his block-and after getting to know his family, you want to help him pack his bags.

Emanuelle manages to make us care about this bullying girl without pleading for sympathy.

Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator is more than an indictment of a man. Orner cross-examines the community that protected a bully for four decades, ever since Bikram pranced before TV cameras flexing his pecs for a cheering audience.

Like its actress, it's an ambitious knockout that doesn't quite live up to its potential. But its argument is worth hearing: Instead of crying for the collapse of one actress, Folman is crying for the collapse of civilization, the triumph of the synthetic over the real.

With commendable wit and zero self-pity, Chinn sketches the daily surreality of her teenage analogue.

Gaudet and Pullapilly argue, cheekily and convincingly, that the real crooks are the unseen conglomerates who’ve created a society that devalues products and their consumers.

Roar is a thrilling bore, an inanity with actual peril in every scene.

Anesthesia doesn't cast judgment. Instead, Nelson slowly reveals awful things about his characters after we've decided to like them. I admire the film's vigor, even if at times it feels like a cruel, clumsy trick.

There's something fearlessly uncool about the film, which suffers mostly from being made 30 years too late.

Åkerlund’s music videos established him as a whiz-bang technician, a skill he only unleashes in two terrifying montages. Lords of Chaos proves that he can also get great performances out of a young cast, especially Kilmer’s otherworldly Dead.

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.

Cumberbatch, a tweedy Brit with an M.A. in Classical Acting and a face like a monstrous Timothy Dalton, has beefed up to become a convincing killer. He's brutal and bold, and the film around him isn't bad either.

The power of the film — and of Palmer’s phenomenal performance — is watching Alice grow into her voice.

Step Up Revolution has again found some of the most kinetic talents in the country.

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.

Together, these tales feel like the hangover at a wake for mankind. The film’s dusky pastel color palette recalls dying flowers on a grave. Yet, even as the synth score mutters anxiously in the background, Alexander takes a prankish delight in her own doom and gloom.