Amy Nicholson

If only the script measured up to the craft. La La Land gives us no reason to root for Mia and Seb’s romance, except for its blithe assurance that you will because you loved Stone and Gosling together in Crazy, Stupid, Love.

At Lonergan's best, he turns the sounds of Patrick's home into its own claustrophobic, percussive sympathy.

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.

No Iraq movie has better captured our country’s nationalistic nonsense, and the inner chaos of the men and women returning home to this noise.

Bad Santa 2 doesn't hate Christmas. It just hates women.

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

Adams’s clear-eyed, open-minded doctor forces us to ask how much we’re willing to communicate.

Newt lacks soul. So, too, does his movie.

Negga, an Ethiopian-born, Irish-raised Hollywood newcomer, gives an Oscar-worthy performance. She's so still and powerful, she gives the film a depth the script doesn't earn. I can't think of the film without thinking of her gaze, and I can't think of that gaze without admiring the film more than it deserves.

The Love Witch, by writer/director Anna Biller, is a feminist film about a character who thinks feminism is bad news. It's delightful.

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.

When it was all over, I found myself googling Dante for my own clue as to what I’d just suffered: “He who knows most grieves most for wasted time.”

Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden is a jaw-dropping, pulse-quickening mash-up.

Jenkins has made something astonishing: a film with immaculate craft that, at the same time, feels spontaneous, even tentative, as if it could panic that it’s revealed too much and close the curtains.

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 film is polite when it should be wicked — it’s melodrama that thinks it’s saving lives, like it drank too much chardonnay and convinced itself that since Gone Girl almost got an Oscar, maybe it can, too. That tonal muck prevents the film from going in any direction.

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.

When no one is making believable choices, who cares who’s human? It’s all just lines of script.

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

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

Phillips has made a copy of a copy, a brotastic toast to capitalism that steals from all the other movies that stole from Scarface and Goodfellas.

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.

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

This solid genre pic salutes its touchstones.

Sausage Party is ballsy and dumb and brilliant all in one bite.

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

Instead of focusing on the squad in the title — the chemistry the audience wants to see — Ayer doubles down on the usual DC tics: dark fights, a humdrum dependence on guns and fists, a cynical everyone-sucks grasp of politics, and sudden rain showers that people ignore. It’s moody and mindless, an angry toddler screaming over his parents’ classic rock mix of The Rolling Stones, The Animals, and a 14-year-old song from Eminem.

I've rarely seen so much effort for so little thrill.

Though Roberts is miscast as a wallflower — seriously, the film expects us to believe a jock in her class would dismiss the mannequin-perfect beauty as “not my type” — Nerve taps into the rush of realizing strangers think you’re cool.

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.

It’s all a little slow and stoic and familiar.

Café Society is a light-fingered, backstabbing trifle. Despite the occasional sour zinger, the film is so retro golden that old-timey miners would run the reels through a sieve.

Spielberg can’t fix The BFG’s strange second act.

DeMonaco makes small choices I admire. For once, no woman gets threatened with rape. Instead, ladies seem to be the aggressors, and as we cruise the streets of D.C. we see wives stabbing and incinerating husbands, or dancing around a tree strung with male corpses.

As much as I enjoyed this bizarre, ambitious adventure and its careful popcorn kitsch, Tarzan’s story will always leave our ears ringing with something we hate, whether you choose Burroughs’s white-savior syndrome or Christoph Waltz’s shivery final speech: “The future belongs to me.”

The dialogue is dense and quick and brainy.

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.

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.

By exposing his soft belly, the aging documentarian is reconquering his own legacy. He's spent 25 years bellowing about our problems. Now it's time to solve them. If we don't think we can, just remember Berlin.

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.

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.

Kaufman builds an emotional world we're nervous to enter, one we're already living in.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens steers the franchise back to its popcorn origins. It's not a Bible; it's a bantamweight blast. And that's just as it should be: a good movie, nothing more.

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.

Howard is great at capturing the timbre of the ship, the creaks and snaps and the whir of the hemp lines, and the sonar clicks of the whales strategizing below. All his sound and fury has a befuddling purpose. His emotional climax is about, well, disaster insurance.

The film could do with fewer panty shots of the listless sisters flopped across each other like kittens. Yet it manages to capture the lethargy of watching your life goals winnow into wifely servitude.

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

If The Danish Girl dared to critique its main characters, it'd be brave. If it had celebrated a modern marriage that worked for 26 years — much longer and stranger than the film lets on — it'd be truly pioneering. Real life is full of kinks, mistakes, and selfish behavior. Biopics, however, are made of formulaic virtue.

Creed wants all of the Rocky drama but invests in none of the smarts.

Most astonishingly, with the franchise's powerful climax, Lawrence has managed to align her parallel Hollywood lives and reinvent the prestigious popcorn flick, a crowd-pleaser with intelligent class.

Entertainment is a painful, poetic watch.

The film doesn't demonstrate belief in much of anything except that audiences must be so desperate for a peek into these stars' private lives that we'll invest energy in their mopey fictional counterparts, who can't even invest in themselves.

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.

David Gordon Green's Our Brand Is Crisis is a horror film wrapped in fast-talking political comedy.

Tokyo Tribe is Sono cackling hysterically while smashing a keytar. Sure, there are a few sour notes, but he's made a great blast of noise.

Nasty Baby isn't satisfying. But on Silva's terms, it makes sense.

Lenny Abrahamson's shattering drama Room borrows its fictional plot from the tabloids and strips it of sensationalism.

What Spielberg seems to want most from this respectable lark is for audiences to notice the parallels between the 1950s and today.

Though this movie waltzes to its own strange rhythm, del Toro hits every note.

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.

Villeneuve's proven he's got a strong punch. The trouble is, he barely aims.

Goodnight Mommy is a well-crafted cheat with a killer punch.

Most docs are lucky to have one wild character. The phenomenal Finders Keepers has two.

Headland's film might have been more engaging if it were about its supporting characters.

Karas showcases the actors' surprisingly good tennis skills, like the continuous volley they do while reciting the lyrics to "Bust a Move" and the deft way Sisto spins his racquet. But rather than develop these two as characters, Break Point tries to score too many points.

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

Remake The Graduate today, and an adult might corner Benjamin Braddock and whisper, "Startups." Debut director Max Joseph gives that a good shot, though the result — the EDM-fueled, drug-laced dream-crusher We Are Your Friends — is so sweaty and silly people may not notice.

As we switch sympathies from scene to scene, Muylaert forces us to think big about the clash between idealism and acceptance, a philosophical war that spills beyond the walls of this small story into every corner of our own lives.

Nima Nourizadeh’s American Ultra is a bloody valentine attached to a bomb. It’s violent, brash, inventive and horrific, and perhaps the most romantic film of the year.

It's clear that Straight Outta Compton is at once too padded and too thin. It's as if the story of these real-life legends was so unruly and dangerous that the filmmakers became the cops, forcing it into submission.

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.

[Paquet-Brenner] squanders Dark Places' icky setup for a rote investigation to find the real killer, a revelation greeted not with a "What?!" but with a "Whatever."

Demme's film plays out like a catnapping afternoon dream. We recognize the world, yet the logic is screwy.

[Wiig's] great, but the film's in the pocket of Powley's rib-high corduroys from the second she struts onscreen — and long after she takes them off.

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.

Here's a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special.