Amy Nicholson

The dialogue is dense and quick and brainy.

Rudd and Robinson’s scenes together are great.

If you think three months is an impossible amount of time to write and produce a feature film, well, it is.

Gold is merely the conduit for the film's real focus: Like his own reviews, City of Gold is a love letter to L.A.

Gibney dissects Jobs's image with the calm curiosity of a coroner.

As semi-inessential as Mickey 17 feels in Bong’s canon, I’m at peace that he keeps asking how to give everyone’s life value. He’ll keep repeating the question until we come up with an answer.

Riff Raff is a solid crime comedy with unusual wiring.

It’s refreshing to see a romp this spry. Elio isn’t trying to reinvent the spaceship — it’s after the puppyish charm of sticking your head out the window as marvels whiz past.

Glazer and Rabinowitz’s script can be patchy and manic, but it does its best work showing the contortions women undergo to prove their support, especially in today’s “yaaaas queen” era where everyone is a goddess.

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.

Bugonia is a hilarious movie with no hope for the future of humanity. What optimism there is lies only in the title, an ancient Greek word for the science of transforming dead cows into hives, of turning death into life.

Director Steven Spielberg doesn't have a steady grip on War Horse's careening tone, but he'll be damned if there's not 15 minutes in there for everyone.

After a decade in development, the project that made it to the screen is a noisy, pixelated smash-and-zap that does manage to capture the spirit of play.

Barry's questions are powerful whether asked by a future president or a future janitor. The script is great no matter who it's about — it's just that fewer curiosity-seekers would give it a watch were it about someone else.

Hurling herself into every scene, Lawrence puts her full faith in Ramsay. It’s not a trust fall so much as a trust cannonball. As good and committed as Lawrence is, there were times I wanted to rescue her from her own movie, to protect her from the fate of Faye Dunaway when “Mommie Dearest” turned another blond Oscar winner into a joke.

For the first time, a Marvel movie draws that pencil line from dream to screen. Where the earlier films felt hard and shiny and steel-colored — the look of bashing action figures on a sidewalk — Strange is ink-smudged and obsessive. It's defiantly old-school — not the cozy, apple-scented nostalgia of the first Captain America film, but that cold, back-of-the-library whiff of eraser nubs and mold.

This is a pressure-cooker film, an exercise in small-budget simplicity that leans on one set and one goal: Keep ’em watching.

Earth to Echo is a slender kiddie flick about a quartet of preteens and their palm-sized alien pal that's at once bland, well-intentioned, and utterly terrifying about the mental development of modern children.

It's less interesting watching them do what they both feel they have to do -- talk about their craft -- especially as both give off the prickly energy of artists who would rather create than explain. They're more comfortable asking one another questions, even though the answers are shrugged off humbly.

Tyldum has robbed his own film of emotional depth — this Turing is as simple as Morse code. Rather than a complex human portrait, this is an assemblage of triumphs, tragedies and tics.

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

The raw ingredients of Raid 2 are superb. But the overall effect is gluttonous and queasy.

Smart, empathetic and wholly believable.

Fegley’s heartbreaking performance is fused onto a marshmallow. Lowery overcompensates for the darkness in the script by making everything else soft and squishy.

It's thrillingly, fiercely female. It takes the same neighborhood-boy-turns-hoodlum story we've seen for a century and simply flips the script.

The Wile E. Coyote fatalities are fun, but it's that repetitive moment of horror that holds this bipolar stunt together: Cruise, bug-eyed and gasping for breath as he shakes off his fear and grimly prepares for the next suicide mission.

There’s something morbid about a world where a brave man is more scared of financial, than physical, risk. But that’s a leap this doc can’t take.

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

This spry celebration reveals that the real Ginsburg is neither beast nor badass, but an even-tempered, soft-spoken mediator—not typically the traits that inspire rousing high-fives, but qualities that honor the slow, uphill slog of positive change.

Don’t Breathe is a small delight, like stumbling across a shiny silver dollar.

Problemista, which Torres wrote, directed and stars in, reveals a new willingness to tell a relatable story with a riveting sketch of an honest-to-goodness person.

Torn between making sense and arguing that the world itself makes no sense, Prisoners is a captive of its own ambitions.

Clearly, the actors feel their characters in their bones.

David Holmes and Brian Irvine’s score is melodic and insistent, and it knows when to fall away into silence to let the audience appreciate Neeson and Manville’s superb chemistry.

With apologies to Ibsen’s ghost, DaCosta’s tweaks have sharpened its rage. I don’t think that long-dead critic would like this “Hedda” any better. I think it’s divine.

Even simply sticking to the facts, the film is a painful watch.

Colossal has no patience for piety or punishment. Even when Gloria gets punched in the face, the film refuses to sob. Instead, it's oddly heroic.

The storytelling is wonky, given the film’s competing needs to be Miranda-blunt about the modern magazine business while pairing marvelously with a glass of rosé.

The script is solid, and the fight scenes are excellent.

Laguionie's animation is a lovely jumble of thick lines and saturated pastels...But while the artist-as-deity concept was flattering enough to get The Painting nominated for a 2012 Cesar Award, its big ideas about equality and friendship are flatly 2-D.

Radcliffe is winningly guileless in his performance, twitching his costume-y eyebrows and mustache like gentle bunny ears even as he lip-syncs “Another One Rides the Bus” with such commitment that his neck veins nearly pop.

The Cleaners has the effect of scanning three dozen grim tweets. There’s not much to latch onto besides an overwhelming sense of helplessness; like the internet itself, it’s crowded with opinions but lacking in intimacy.

Tilt “Materialists” at an angle and it’s the same film as “Past Lives,” only bolder and funnier. Really, Song wants to know whether a sensible girl can justify shackling herself to a broke creative.

A stellar debut.

Hooray! A romantic comedy that revives the screwball formula where two people talk themselves silly — and we only had to go to the end of the solar system to make it happen.

[Anderson's] managed to build yet another dazzler, a shrine to his own ambition and craft. And while it sometimes feels a bit drafty in the corners, the accomplishment itself is plenty.

The gripping documentary Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal shifts the spotlight back to Singer, played in re-enactments by Matthew Modine with dialogue taken directly from wiretaps, to understand how a flip flop-clad former basketball coach rebranded himself as an academic glad-hander for the 1 percent.

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

The film struggles to find an appropriate ending for a woman who’s itching to get back to work.

Though it ticks on too long, watching Fujitani's fascinating sleuth overestimate her skills is as satisfying as a mug of hot matcha on a soul-chilling night.

Fashion is about that clash between commercialism and individuality — how can I stand out while fitting in? — and Sacha Jenkins's streetwear doc Fresh Dressed nods its Kangol hat to that irony.

Maybe they don’t all deserve to escape punishment. But these otherwise overlooked lives deserve a spotlight.

But having stuck the landing once (and a few more times), DeBlois doesn’t leave himself much runway to do something new and improved. This “How to Train Your Dragon” is merely longer.

As sloppy as it is, there’s no denying that Honey Don’t! works as a noir with a pleasant, peppery flavor. Yet, there’s a snap missing in its rhythm, a sense that it doesn’t know when and how its gags should hit.

The final product feels like if the greatest musician in the world tried to write a classic in 15 minutes. Yet, “How to a Build a Girl” dares to argue that reinventing yourself doesn’t make you a poseur ... It’s a young person’s jam that will hit the right teen like a thunderbolt.

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

Alberdi’s comic-caper approach soon fizzles. Like Sergio, the film is hunting for drama, something to merit the 007 guitar and upright bass riffs of Vincent van Warmerdam’s score.

The bad news is that if you haven't seen "Thor," "Captain America" and "Iron Man 2" - that's six hours and three minutes of homework - The Avengers won't make sense. The good news is if you're a human under the age of 45, you probably already have.

The direction is so heavy-handed that it feels like Parker is afraid audiences don’t know slavery is wrong. Or maybe that truth is all he’s comfortable using Nat Turner to say.

Writer-director Tayarisha Poe’s cold and stylish debut, commands attention. More specifically, Simone’s Selah seizes it.

The doc is a fascinating insight into how individual choices can shape the news.

The story’s pleasures are more literary than cinematic. On screen, it’s more obvious that Mr. Moore’s ideas don’t quite line up.

Freed from reality, Lin turns into a kid gifted a box of markers and glitter: Everything is manic and distracting. There’s a cool swoosh where the lens surfs behind the Enterprise as it accelerates through a tube, but mostly the tricks are garish.

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

It’s a hero story for wonks and scientists, people who spend their days surrounded by dry-erase boards inked with numbers and grids and yet go to work in a jumpsuit, their faces smeared with muck.

The irony at the core of the Dr. Ruth persona is that the maverick who made the bedroom public is herself incredibly private, and while she encourages women to get intimate with their bodies, she’s not in touch with her own emotions. Still, she is vocal about respecting boundaries, and White acquiesces, trusting that the facts of Westheimer’s life say plenty about her peppy workaholism.

It’s mostly Pugh’s tale, a smart move as she delivers one of the better performances I’ve seen in a super suit.

For all its empathy and equilibrium, The East has nowhere to go after the script backs itself into a corner.

You're Next streamlines the gory stuff for something truly shocking: good characters. Not deep, mind you. But characters who are crayoned in bright enough that they're interesting even while alive.

Deep Water is a wickedly funny potboiler about sex, gossip and hypocrisy that Mr. Lyne has transplanted from the suburban Northeast to New Orleans, a city that sweats menace despite the film’s chilly blue cinematography and coldly erotic score.

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.

The four leads are yanked not by their heart strings but by the machinations of a plot that steers them from one contrived scene to another, just so it can point to the skid marks and call them a sketch of the new American family.

Land Ho! feints toward pathos and perversity, only to decide that it's better off giving us abridged, postcard emotions.

The pleasures of “F1” are engineered to bypass the brain. It’s muscular and thrilling and zippy, even though at over two-and-a-half hours long, it has a toy dump truck’s worth of plot.

Chef is so charmingly middlebrow that it's exactly the cinematic comfort food it mocks: Favreau has made not a game-changing meal to remember, but a perfect chocolate lava cake.

Once I Think We’re Alone Now establishes that Grace and Del represent love versus stability, the film doesn’t have a convincing way to reconcile the two.

A Quiet Place: Day One, the startlingly effective prequel to the 2018 blockbuster about noise-sensitive aliens that devour anyone who’s ever annoyed a librarian, hits Manhattan with a bang, a nasty body count and a fair amount of audience suspicion.

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

This isn’t quite the heart-soaring “Superman” I wanted. But these adventures wise him up enough that I’m curious to explore where the saga takes him next.

What lingers in Nathan's documentary isn't the swaggering trails of diesel fumes. It's the sadness of watching Pug narrow his options.

Nicholas Stoller's hilarious Neighbors splashes into summer with the satisfying swish-plop-hooray of a winning beer pong serve.

The result is a faintly comic curio that hurtles along without much impact.

Batkid Begins wants audiences to celebrate the everyday heroes who donated their time and energy to Miles's dream. Absolutely, we should. Still, take a minute to ask what the disproportionate investment and interest in Batkid's adventure says about our own maturity — and how the internet allows us to feel like champions for rallying for one afternoon, while overlooking the years of unglamorous doctor appointments before it.