Amy Nicholson

A gut punch with a side of anguish.

It’s rousing stuff and a bit glib.

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.

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.

This movie is a narrow character piece that shows Pacino wrestling to reveal layers in a man who's worried he might actually be hollow. He and Fogelman string together dozens of small, perfect moments.

Eclipse has its cheesecake and eats it, too.

What works is the high energy, kooky cast who fling themselves into the carefree choreography — especially Magnus, a mugging, contagious delight.

“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).

The staggering design ambition balances out the plot’s affecting, relatable ordinariness.

The cumulative assassinations begin to ache like a mysterious bruise, making the audience feel the psychic weight of living in fear. Yet, the style of the film is more teen soap opera than vérité miserablism.

This is a soap opera that stands at a distance from its characters (that distance being the length of a lawyer's briefcase) and, though handsome and capable, feels as inert as mannequins in a shop window.

You'd expect more yucks from the country that bequeathed tentacle porn unto the world.

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.

Just because a film holds back the truth doesn't make the truth suspenseful. It merely shortchanges the filmmaker and the audience from exploring what that truth means.

Fogel and Joni Lefkowitz's script captures the girls' relationship in fine detail.

The film’s self-seriousness is as oppressive as its setting’s monotonous fog.

The cast keeps us invested in Filly's furious resurrection.

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.

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 Maze Runner is so bleak that it almost convinces us to take it seriously.

Ford is hilarious and brooding, deeply wrinkled and deeply intimidating. He's got the best lines, courtesy of screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna (of the repellent "27 Dresses" and the much better "The Devil Wears Prada").

Some might see the final act as body horror. To the director, it’s a metaphysical sacrament — and all along, his camera has hinted that mankind must commit to the planet before it’s too late.

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.

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

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.

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.

Whatever Gyllenhaal wants to do, she does, which becomes its own act of captivation and reckless empowerment. It helps that Buckley and Bale are terrific, as is the ensemble at large. The full force of Lawrence Sher’s cinematography, Karen Murphy’s production design and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s orchestral score is fabulous, combining to make something seedy, moody and extravagant.

This is a guaranteed blockbuster that nobody needed except studio accountants and parents. I’ll accept it on those terms because it’s a good thing when any kid-pleaser gets children in the habit of going to the movie theater.

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.

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.

It is clear from the offset which sibling will win both Paige’s affection and the obligatory climactic smooch. The journey there can drag. More fresh is the movie’s sex-positive empathy.

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

There's no honor among thieves, but there is dignity in Focus's ambition. And if the final film is more vodka ad than all-time classic, there's still no shame in pouring another cocktail and rewinding the tape.

There's freedom in facing the truth. There would be even more freedom in a heroine finishing the film in her favorite ugly overalls, but we haven't gotten there yet.

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.

With more actual grrrl power, Maleficent would be a bold redo. Instead, it's a beautiful snooze, a story that hints at the darkness underneath our fairy tales and tarnishes the idea of true love without quite daring to say what's really on its mind: that even the best of us might not live happily ever after.

The film’s early snark turns as cloying and insincere as the cultural doublespeak that it parodies. By the final act, its dialogue is so burdened by inspirational maxims about personal authenticity that it feels as though the script has been hijacked by yearbook quotes.

There’s little urgency or outrage. Instead of a funhouse mirror of what could be, it’s merely a smudged reflection of what is.

If only Shepard's movie lived up to his leading man. It's merely a frame for a character portrait, with Shepard's camera screwing our eyes to Law's performance and pasting in supporting actors and situations for no larger purpose than to see his reaction to them.

[A] cheery, lightweight documentary.

Though Wuthering Heights is a phony tease, I’m grateful that Fennell wants to titillate audiences.

Beast Beast’s plot twist is a swing at gravitas that disrupts the balance of Madden’s naturalistic character study. This is the way teen life is, Madden says, until suddenly the film accelerates from reality to sensationalism, and trades humanity for pulp.

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

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.

Despite their wundercabinet of delights, the filmmakers most want to celebrate human beings in all their contradictions. Each of us, the movie says, is capable of everything.

The film is besotted by its own cleverness. The overwrought dialogue clashes with the rest of the movie’s naturalism. But Smyth’s very point is that ordinary folk have the right to strive for poetry — and his shaggy sincerity wins out in the end. With this promising ditty as his debut feature, the filmmaker introduces himself as a voice to be heard.

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

While Clouds is as doe-eyed and puppyish as an acoustic serenade, Baldoni is wise to recognize that attention must be paid to Zach’s survivors.

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.

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

The documentary repeats three monotonous points: Journalists lie. Regardless, Assange is a journalist who deserves protection. Also, his family misses him a heck of a lot.

Cho and Isaac’s stellar performances expose the gulf between familiarity and intimacy.

Levinson’s battling more villains than any script can take on, and by the end, his sharp jabs bleed into a gory finale that settles for cathartic cheers.

Hosking has a vision, and more often that not, it works.

Stiller balances his big ambitions with small, grounded truths.

Mood Indigo is bitter candy, a heartbreaker that uses sugar as a trap.

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.

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.

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

By Jackass standards, Bad Grandpa is benign—it’s neither as fun nor as thrilling as watching Knoxville play tetherball with a beehive.

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.

It’s a magpie movie that’s happy to give audiences the tinselly things they want — i.e., two robots clobbering the Wi-Fi out of each other. But Johnstone creates openings for his own shaggy sense of humor. I’m excited to keep tabs on the promising New Zealander.

The script is as subtle as a bonk on the nose, and the editing repeats every beat twice-over in broad pantomime and meaningful looks.

Kunis’s alpha female appears at once ferocious and like a conspicuous sham. (Imagine Sheryl Sandberg as a “Scooby-Doo” villain.) Her performance carries the film — a fortunate break for the director Mike Barker, who has the near-impossible challenge of shepherding the tone from snark to painful sincerity.

Our world so hauntingly echoes Collins’s fictions that the film, shot last summer, moves us to spend its gargantuan running time reflecting on contemporary headlines, mourning the generational tragedy of anger and fear begetting anger and fear.

Statham excels as a straight-faced goof. Between his glower and the movie’s high-quality production values, this brain cell-destroying schlock resembles an earnest drama.

It’s a film prone to tonal whiplash. Yet the script has made some sharp trims, scrapping a subplot about Ellen DeGeneres and eliminating some of Ryle’s most outlandish behavior.

The movie’s passion is incredible — but, boy, is it embodied in something awkward.

It works better than most of Allen's recent films because it's a trifle without pretense, and because the director's finally smartened up — a little — right when everyone's written him off.

It’s disruptive, and then cathartic, to watch Dafoe’s primal performance dominate this museum/mausoleum and force us to side with humanity. He’s perfectly cast in a part that calls for quietly whirring intelligence.

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.

"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.

The script is ridiculous, the bodies are great and the film skates so long on the line between knowingly bad and bad that by the time the body count hits 100 and the booby count hits 1000, we've lost track of the difference.

The film grasps onto anything that will amuse itself for a scene.

Free Samples is a film about wasting time, and it feels like it. Despite clocking in at 79 minutes, Jay Gammill's comedy drags by no fault of its delightfully sour lead.

Mr. McKay’s comedy is at its best when his tone is big, ridiculous and cheerfully subversive.

An uneven, uneasy fable of desire.

Even if you don’t know her music, the film still works an acidic sketch of fame.

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.

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.

Blast Beat cares far more about testing the limits of the family’s togetherness, and while the resolution doesn’t have the sweetness of a pop song, Arango is happy to settle for heavy metal discordance.

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.

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.”

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.

The first hour of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert convinces you that the King is the greatest entertainer who ever lived. By the end of it, he’s a god.

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

There's no credibility to Arielle and Brian's romance. We get why he likes her — who wouldn't? But what does she see in this nine-years-younger naif she treats like a slow child?

Frost can play lovable losers in his sleep, but to succeed, Cuban Fury has to make him dance. A fat man falling down gets a cheap laugh; a fat man with magic feet makes us cheer. Director James Griffiths splits the difference between ridicule and respect, and the resulting comedy is as trite and cloying as a rum and coke.

The bigger the scope and the more Cooper’s psychology is explained, the less taut the film feels.