Amy Nicholson

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.

Cuties' job is to coil the contrasting messages and spin them until her lead falls down dizzy, which can make the film feel as subtle as a headache.

It’s “The Bachelorette” wed to “The Iceman Cometh”: the setup is staged, but the tears are real.

Costume designer Ceci’s ensembles and Scott Kuzio’s production design are spot-on. Just as impressive is Simien’s steady handle on his serio-comic tone, at once sly, resonant, and horrific.

Patterson trusts that chemistry will compensate for a gentle thriller that chooses to impress with ingenuity and charm instead of special effects.

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.

Despite its climactic eye-rolls, Friday’s Child is a great showcase for Sheridan

If you’ve seen even one based-on-a-true-story British misfit hobbyists movie, you already know the tune.

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.

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.

As startling as it is to see the beloved scientist hated in her time, that we’re able to see this headstrong legend as a sexual being at all is a credit to how much Pike gradually humanizes her as a woman, while never pleading for our pity.

The journey is wondrous for the characters, less compelling for the audience.

Oddly, after leaving us aching for the film to go off the rails, when “Angel of Mine” finally does in the final scene, its message is so screwy that the audience might feel as loopy as poor Lizzie.

“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.

Murder Mystery feels as shamelessly gaudy as paste jewelry — a trinket for nights that aspire to nothing more exotic than a pizza — but Aniston sparkles like the real deal.

He left behind enough tape from both ends of the microphone that Belkin is able to create his entire documentary with old footage, juiced by retro imagery of broadcast air waves and vintage dials and knobs.

Every line of dialogue in Trial by Fire is wrapped with so much exposition that the film feels tied to the train-tracks of good taste. Characters don’t converse, they simply say all their thoughts aloud.

Sure, Sagan’s scientific method dominates the universe. But here on earth, this crowd-pleaser convinces us to spend one day savoring an American Dream.

What it means, Alcazar leaves open for interpretation. He’s more a mood maker than a story teller, and the film feels like people watching at a fancy party and inhaling different wafts of perfume.

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

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.

This cheerful small town portrait makes for an idealistic crowd-pleaser (after all, Eureka Springs is the rumored home of healing waters), but this beautiful, and beautifully shot, documentary is a cure for the angry headline blues.

Mostly I Am Mother is exactly what it seems: a good-looking allegory that postures like it’s wrestling with more ideas than it actually is.

Corporate Animals is a character sketch in search of a plot.

The paradox of "Little Monsters" is that it’s so guileless in its story and execution, it could have been made for kids, except for the disembowelings. Still, Nyong’o not only survives the film with her dignity intact, the audience might exit admiring her more.

Anvari has set out to make a mood piece that succeeds in scaring the audience senseless.

In the last act, Poulton and Savage’s long fuse explodes, and they get to prove they’ve made a hell of a picture.

The crux of Gun’s struggle is that she risked everything to tell the truth, and the war happened anyway. Ultimately, her personal story was neither uplifting, nor tragic, which means the film surrounding her doesn’t hurtle toward a satisfying arc.

Knock Down the House has a clear political agenda. It wants to promote the hard work, courage and progressive policies of these women, who have all experienced financial hardship. Still, the film lets its subjects do the talking instead of cluttering things with statistics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

306 Hollywood is best when it gets either very scientifically dry, or reaches beyond its liminal cuteness into ambitious visual poetry.

Even at its most suspenseful, when Jed Kurzel’s cello score stabs at the eardrums, Overlord feels familiar, a collage of cinematic nightmares checking off its influences.

The film feels a lot like the Serge Gainsbourg number that Stephanie dances to in the kitchen: jazzy, a little sleazy, and worth a cult following.

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.

None of the sizzle is as compelling as this character study of a young woman who confesses that her only childhood companion was the TV.

Destination Wedding barely holds together as a coherent film. It’s too callous for coos, too chipper to examine the dark corners of the soul. Yet it works as a valentine to old-fashioned star power — two modern legends, older if no wiser, daring the audience to somehow love them for all their faults, and on that level, somehow succeeding.

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.

Its refractory tone, both deadpan and swoony, announces that the first-time feature directors have a phenomenal eye for character (which is something those who’ve been watching Marks’ work as an actress may already have realized).

With the right script, this trio could make a fantastic flick. Forget these “spectacular” men. These flawed women are plenty.

Surprisingly, there’s emotional resonance in this slapstick flick about friends who are terrified to hug. Add that to the solid chemistry between the leads, and Tag is a fine callback to the sprawling ensemble comedies of the 1980s, back when the real-life tag team graduated high school. It’s a solid summer film that will melt away from memory by fall.

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.

Loose-kneed, sloppy, and powered by charisma, this hangout flick doesn’t just embrace gross-out girl comedy cliches, it sticks Jacobs in the air roof of a limousine screaming, “Whooo! I am a total cliché right now and I don’t f–king care!”

This is a heartier celebration of McCarthy’s talents, a mash note to a comic who can also play flirtatious, empathetic, and human. She’s believable, even if the scenes setting-off her performance aren’t.

Compared to Rampage, King Kong and Godzilla have James Brown levels of soul. Peyton has just made another movie about the Rock running through rubble.

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

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

Neville’s fantastic archival footage reveals the man through his work — or at least, it reveals his philosophies, if not the childhood memories that gave Rogers the ability to understand a four-year-old’s brain, almost as if he still carried his in his cardigan pocket.

Hall’s performance — tender, tough, empathetic, controlled — crumples from tears to laughter in a blink. It’s phenomenal.

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.

The film only feigns at analysis. It’s as naïve about love as Blake herself, who skips through the world like a temperamental child.

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.

Ultimately, Fast Color’s thesis is more inspirational than the film, which often seems like it, too, is struggling to swirl itself into something more solid. Instead, its magical sparks don’t quite congeal as the audience can’t help hoping a movie this empathetic and unusual reaches transcendence

"Dark Web” skates by on saturated nastiness, one terrific kill, and the audience’s engagement in seeing if the filmmakers can pull off the stunt. Barely, but it’s fun to watch them try.

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.

Director Francis Lawrence drains the pleasure out of seeing a pretty girl in her panties. He refuses to let us leer at Jennifer Lawrence’s long legs without a jab of shame. What’s left is cold and perverse, heat provided only by the satisfying ways Dominika out-thinks the creeps while pretending to be their “magic pussy.”

It manages to be both bizarre and boring. While I admire Jones’ inventive details...the film simply looks cheap.

Half Magic is hobbled by a debut director’s desire to be liked. But Graham’s passion is sincere, even if her tone and rushed pace — the byproduct of cramming in every idea in case she doesn’t get a second chance — teeters on sitcom.

Permission is a small story made with big performances from leads Stevens and Hall, and while it hasn’t gotten the promotional push for audiences to pay attention, people lucky enough to stumble across it will fall for everyone involved, and commit to keeping tabs on Crano’s career.

Bright has brief jolts of life.

Give Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle credit for not wholly insulting the audience’s intelligence. The entire script is centered on these cliches embracing their cliché new bodies, cocooning stereotypes inside stereotypes like nesting dolls.

There’s a frozen loogie at the heart of The Snowman.

Morgen’s structural inspiration is to organize Jane not around the facts Goodall found about chimps, but the emotions the chimps help this strong, independent woman find in herself.

Bad Moms is a retro throwback that proves girl comedies can rage as hard — and as mindlessly — as any dumb all-dude giggler.

Most of all, Coco hums with the idea that we’re kept alive by the stories people tell about us when we’re gone. Whether Coco itself will be an eternal story is iffy. But I’m glad it’s with us today.

Beat by beat, My Little Pony: The Movie is at once clichéd and exceptional.

O’Brien could grow into the role. He has an earnest, high voice — perhaps the reason he’s barely allowed to speak — and shines in the rare scenes where he gets to show personality, as do Keaton and Kitsch when they put down their guns.... It’d be more fun to watch the three actors swap war stories over beers than batter each other — especially when their worst enemy is the script’s coma-inducing machismo.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Instead of a thrilling climax, he chooses to let the story evaporate into the Amazon fog. Yet this odd film left a chill in my bones that I'll be thinking about all summer.

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.

Like life itself, the film is unemotional and cruel. It hides its own nihilism behind grotesqueries that force the audience's stomachs to clench. We can't help feeling things. After all, we, too, are just collections of cells, and Espinosa plays our nervous system like a flamenco guitar in concert with head-pounding drums and nauseous trombones.

Ducournau has made a beautiful film about terrible horrors.

Kong: Skull Island is an offering to the hungry mouths at the multiplex who want to cheer a movie that doesn't insult, or tax, their intelligence.

The film doesn't trust Deutch to complete the full redemption arc from sinner to saint, which is, you know, the point of the script. She's a marshmallow from minute one, and that's a shame because Deutch is capable of being a real pistol.

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

Peele is so attuned to the tiny ways race sneaks into conversations that we hear it in every line. Our suspicions are so heightened, we start to second-guess our own senses.

The Great Wall doesn't have the lunacy that made last year's Gods of Egypt a hoot. Zhang can't kick his craving for respectability, even if he's making a movie that flips the middle finger at historicity.

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

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 movies aren't so bad they're good. They're so brilliantly bad they're genius, with Foley dutifully presenting every inane plot point while gifting us excuses to laugh.

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

The Space Between Us has admirable ambition, even though none of it works. Sure, the romance is a bust and the script is a howl. Yet every so often, Butterfield becomes infatuated with a new earth treasure...and for a moment, the film reminds us that there are things on this planet worth risking your life for.

It’s hard to spend time with Jackie, and Hackford doesn’t make a convincing case as to why we should. Instead, the script attempts to justify his bitterness by lowering the rest of the world to his level.

It's possible to watch Silence and see a story about saints martyred by an oppressive government. It's also possible to see a told-you-so parable about imperialists who should have stayed home. I suspect Scorsese would be a little disappointed by either conclusion. But he stays quiet because he wants to challenge the audience to go deeper inside themselves, to separate our own religion (or lack of one) from the faith that guided us to it.

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.

We’re stuck with Hancock’s vanilla saga about a soulless businessman who failed until he won big, a story that might have worked in the cynical ’90s but today has a moral obligation to say something with its two-hour running time.

[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.

Live by Night loses energy whenever Sienna Miller’s not around. She makes this world with its showdowns about machismo and machine guns seem fresh, instead of the same old antler clashes.

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.

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.